


Syndication

by John_Quixote



Category: Farscape, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, Gen, Single-Universe Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-06 05:25:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14049870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/John_Quixote/pseuds/John_Quixote
Summary: Written for the Terra Firma Scapers' "StarBurst Challenge #100".  When Scorpius nabs Crichton and Aeryn and drags them through a wormhole to Earth, they don't find the weak and defenseless planet they're expecting.  The US Air Force has been busy—and it winds up being a family reunion for more than just John Crichton.





	1. Chapter 1

One-hundred monens is nearly eight cycles in Peacekeeper Standardized Time.

Peacekeeper Standardized Time, used throughout the galaxy nowadays, was bequeathed to the Sebacean race by the Eidelons, once upon a very long time ago, even though the Eidelons used no such system themselves. Why was this done? Perhaps the early Sebaceans were not fully adapted to life in space; perhaps they still required some deep, rhythmic connection to their ancestral home planet.

The turn of the Earth, the intricate dance of the Moon about the planet about the Sun—it lives deep within each Peacekeeper to this very day, and it has been foisted upon their clients and their conquered subjects and their neighbors, who all make at least some use of this system out of simple necessity. And yet, hardly any of them—Sebacean or Scarran, Nebari or Luxan, Hynerian or Interion—were ever aware that they owe this system to the primitive backwater on the other side of the galaxy, the Human homeworld of Earth.

Even the Peacekeepers forgot this fact long ago, just as they forgot the Eidelons. Just as they forgot themselves—and their own humanity.

It is a strange and seemingly arbitrary system: fifty microts to the arn, twenty-five arns to the solar day. Seven solar days to the weeken, four weekens to the monen, thirteen monens to the cycle. A bit cleaned up and streamlined compared to the sundry solar and lunar calendars used on Earth, past and present; divested from the messy and irregular wobblings of its origin, Peacekeeper Standardized Time could afford to become simple and straightforward, having no need for leap years or the occasional brute correction for axial precession or any other such contrivance. But still, the queer proportions and divisions of time hardly changed down through the millennia.

Modern historians of the Peacekeepers (to say nothing of the many races dwelling in or adjacent to their domain) always assumed that this time-measuring system must have been some reflection of the Sebacean species' original homeworld, and indeed this is the case. But finding and identifying that mysterious aboriginal planet was of no importance to any but the most pedantic of archaeologists, and even then, before the arrival of John Crichton into Peacekeeper Space, their quest would have been futile. In the absence of wormhole technology, it remains a fruitless niche, of interest to practically no one.

But the fact remains: one-hundred monens, by virtue of the fact that the "monen" is indeed a Lunar month, and the "cycle" a Terran revolution, is equivalent to seven cycles, nine monens, or if you prefer, seven-point-seven cycles.

* * *

Seven-point-seven cycles is rather a long time to a human.

In middle age, seven-point-seven cycles is time enough for a man to come to an understanding of who he is; to have the rug yanked out from underneath his feet; to become someone else entirely; and to still save enough room for a mid-life crisis later on.

It's also plenty of time to realize that  _some_  people are simply never going to change.

* * *

Scorpius has named his prototype cruiser the  _Conquistador_ , the first in a brand-new class of deep-space explorers which will always bear that name. To the rest of the Peacekeepers, it's just another word—the translator microbes see to that. The standard Sebacean language—the Peacekeeper dialect—is mostly Eidelon in origin, mutated by more than twenty-five-thousand cycles of linguistic drift, but basically unadulterated by any input from the ancient human abductees. The first Peacekeepers learned the alien tongue of their benefactors; whatever pidgins and creoles they might have employed at the outset to foster communication have been lost to the millennia. Nevertheless, a scant few words here and there have indeed survived all that vast time; or have been borrowed into Sebacean from alien tongues. This is the way of it with language: true purity, of the sort that the Peacekeepers once idealized, is a practical impossibility.

And so, for most of the Peacekeepers, "conquistador" seems utterly befitting, like "vigilante". It denotes a victor; a conqueror. And it does so in a word that sounds like it could perhaps be Ancient Sebacean, or some fringe borrowing from a rural planet. Hardly anything out of the ordinary. It's just the sort of thing that Peacekeepers ought to call their ships.

But Scorpius knows that Crichton will appreciate his little inside joke: he understands the word's other connotations without translation. Explorer. Adventurer. Colonizer. The total, brutal domination and exploitation of one culture by another using the twin edges of ruthlessness and superior technology.

From his vantage point overlooking the bridge, Scorpius gazes down at the cadre of officers, navigators, gunners. He notes with satisfaction that three of the bridge personnel are alien—not even half-breeds, just ordinary non-Sebaceans. An unusually aggressive Interion male serves as one of his gunners. He has a Kalish defector, a female, as a pilot; and Scorpius prides himself on the fact that she will advance in the Peacekeepers, or not, based on her merits—and regardless of any lingering feelings (for good or ill) that he may yet harbor for the infamous Sikozu Shanu. The third alien, a rotund and yellow-furred Yufey'yet male, stands by with his fellow techs, monitoring readings coming from the ship's unique shielding and sensor systems in real time.

The Sebacean techs, Scorpius notes, have no problem getting along with the Yufey'yet, accepting the alien as one of their own. The Sebacean soldiers—well, they're disciplined officers, and by now they certainly know better than to let any private displeasure become something public and unseemly.

The bridge of the  _Conquistador_  is brighter and more open than that of any Command Carrier. Transparent and ultra-durable windows offer a panoramic view of surrounding space. At the moment, the cruiser is warping its way through the middle of absolutely nowhere special. It has the same top speed as a Command Carrier, roughly a thousand times the speed of light when traveling at maximum hetch, and even then the distant stars only lazily drift by, barely seeming to move.

This is an utterly dull little corner of Peacekeeper space. There is almost nothing of interest here, not for a hundred light-cycles around. There are a few commerce planets, a few farming planets (most of which once produced Tannot root for the Peacekeepers, before the Scarrans glassed those worlds' surfaces from orbit some eight cycles back), and a rogue asteroid field that drifts along the caravan-route between one of those dead planets, Sykar, and the old prison-colony at Terran Raa.

Still, there's  _one_  special thing about this part of space, as Scorpius knows all too well. This is the place where a wormhole first delivered John Crichton into the fateful hands of Moya, and Tauvo and Bialar Crais, and Aeryn Sun. This is the region that holds the proof of a most startling fact: that the fate of an entire galaxy was altered by a member of a primitive species, barely space-capable, stumbling upon the most sought-after scientific secret in living memory.

In this place, space and time themselves once converged to alter  _themselves_  and thereby make history.

This idle, grandiose musing is interrupted by the voice of one of the navigators, calling up to Scorpius's command-platform (which stands fully three motras above the floor of the command deck, and thus well above the heads of all the other officers on the bridge, seated or standing). "Sir, we're approaching the coordinates. Fifty microts"

Scorpius nods; then he addresses the Kalish pilot. "Sub-Officer Nalu, all stop."

Without a word, the pilot immediately disengages the  _Conquistador's_  hetch drive. The mighty vessel—smaller than a Command Carrier by far, but meaner in its own way than even that misbegotten mutant Talyn ever was—drops out of FTL and drifts on inertia alone.

"Take readings," orders Scorpius.

The Yufey'yet tech answers in a gruff, jowly voice. "Sensors read positive. The asteroids are orbiting an unidentified gravitational anomaly. It  _could_  be an open wormhole."

A young female Sebacean stands on the command platform with Scorpius: his attaché, Lt. Zeyn Gallara. Her blonde hair is pulled back in a tight braid; her fair skin is almost as ashen-white as Scorpius's own. Her private ambition… is useful, at the moment. She smiles. "You were correct. Congratulations, sir."

Scorpius keeps his expression neutral, but he cannot deny himself a moment's private satisfaction. "If there is one thing that I have learned in all my cycles of service, Lt. Gallara," he intones, "premature celebration of expected success is folly." He gives his attaché a sidelong glance, and—she's never quite seen that before—there's an honest-to-Cholak twinkle of mischief in his eye. How entirely disturbing. Scorpius concludes, "Or—as our guest would phrase it—'do not count your  _chickens_  before they've hatched.'"

Lt. Gallara stares blankly. "'Chickens', sir?"

Scorpius ignores her and addresses the techs. "Shielding systems?"

One of the Sebacean techs, who cannot quite keep the fear out of his voice, reports, "The boards show all systems at optimum, sir."

Scorpius nods again. Then he turns to Lt. Gallara and says, "It's time for the guests of honor to join us on command."

* * *

A short while later, Scorpius marches down into the cargo hold of his ship. Two black-armored Peacekeeper infantry stand ready as the massive metal doors rumble open. He crosses the threshold into a cavernous storage-space, brightly lit, clean, well-organized. Metallic crates are stacked everywhere, a whole cycle's worth of provisions for a crew of four hundred men and women.

Scorpius is accompanied by Lt. Gallara, the two soldiers, and two techs wheeling a boxy machine covered in lights and dials. Once the doors are open, the cargo hold is totally silent, except for the footfalls on the deck-plating and one squeaky wheel underneath the techs' device.

At last, they come to the object which has been the centerpiece of the cargo-hold for a little less than four monens: a massive pile of solidified green resin, two motras tall and twice as wide. It he were able to see it, Crichton would call it a gigantic, hardened "Jell-O mold"; or perhaps a huge, frozen snot. But Crichton cannot see the object.

Because Crichton is frozen inside of it.

"How do you get yourself into these predicaments, Crichton?" Scorpius muses aloud. "When I think about all of the time, energy, and resources that have gone into pursuing you over the last twelve cycles…" He gives a wistful shake of his head and then motions for the techs to begin their work.

At once, they set up their machine, each attaching a pair of wires to opposite ends of the resinous blob. One of the techs activates the device, causing an extremely high sonic pitch to fill the cargo-hold. The two soldiers power up their pulse-rifles and train them on the object. The tech operating the machine cranks the dial—the hum becomes an ear-splitting whine—and  _ **CRACK!**_

Several things happen at once.

The machine backfires, sending one of the techs careening into the deck-plating with a sickening crunch. The soldiers' pulse-rifles short out with a loud pop and a shower of sparks—both grunts drop their weapons in surprise. And the giant frozen green Jell-O mold—that shatters into a billion fragments; and a microt later, John Crichton and Aeryn Sun are coughing their lungs out and trying to wipe green amber-dust out of their eyes.

"Aer—" Crichton coughs. "Aeryn, baby—are you—?"

"I'm here," she coughs back, "I'm here, John."

They embrace each other. They support each other. "The giant—loogie-spitting lizard—did we win?"

"I… think so?" says Aeryn. Then she manages to get some of the green dust out of her eyes, and she looks around, and she sees Scorpius standing a short distance away, watching them with dispassionate curiosity. Instantly, her hand drops down to her holster; but of course, it's empty. Her gun had been knocked out of her hand during their unfortunate encounter with the Mucous Squamate of Klybar IV.

To her credit, Scorpius observes, she does not panic. She does nothing impetuous. She simply nudges Crichton. "John."

John is still trying to free his eyes of hardened snot-flakes. "I tell you what, honey. Let's never mention the lizard to the others." He coughs, loudly. "Ever."

"Agreed," says Aeryn, brushing the dust off her leather overcoat. "Not exactly our most romantic anniversary getaway."

Crichton shrugs. "Eh… it's in the top five." Then, at last, he too can see. And he sees Scorpius, who smiles and opens his arms wide.

"Crichton! Commandant Sun. Welcome aboard the—"

Before he can finish his speech, Crichton is already stumbling through the pile of shattered amber, moving to attack the nearest target, one of the PK soldiers. Scorpius rolls his eyes and shakes his head in frustration. "Crichton, you—" Crichton is trying to punch the soldier through his armor, but his blows are totally ineffectual; he is more apt to hurt himself than the Peacekeeper. "—Crichton, please cease this, this futility. You have been in stasis for a hundred solar days, you cannot—"

Crichton and Aeryn both start at that. "WHAT!?" they cry at the same time. "Three months!?" continues Crichton, while Aeryn makes her own atrophied lunge at Scorpius and shouts, "Where are our children? Where's Moya!?"

Scorpius holds up both hands. "Please, be calm! As far as I am aware, they are all safely in the Hynerian Prime System! Or at least, they were—when we left them there, a quarter of a cycle ago."

Crichton's attempts to hit the Peacekeeper have resulted in his being pushed violently down onto the deck. Now he rolls onto his hands and knees and tries to push himself up—but he can't. "THREE MONTHS!?"

Scorpius sighs and gestures to the soldier. "Help him up." The Peacekeeper roughly pulls Crichton to his feet and holds him.

"Where. Are. We?" demands Aeryn. The other soldier stands close to her; she has no more strength right now than Crichton, but she keeps herself standing upright with willpower alone.

"As I was trying to explain, you are aboard my deep-space explorer, a prototype vessel—"

"You've  _shanghaied_  us!" accuses Crichton.

"In fact, I've rescued you," insists Scorpius calmly.

"Rescued  _my ass_ ," says Crichton, pushing himself onto his feet so that he can point a finger at his old foe. "The big fat line between 'rescuing' and 'kidnapping' is about three months wide!"

"I have my reasons!" Scorpius snaps. "Consider that I have done you no harm; that the paralytic venom found in the mucus of the Klybarian Lizard has kept you in comfortable suspension for—"

"Comfortable!?" retorts Crichton with a crazed giggle. "I don't feel comfortable, I feel like I've been hit by a Mack truck! How 'bout you, babe? Feelin' comfy?"

Aeryn answers at once, "Definitely not comfy. More like what you said before, about the muck-track."

Scorpius sneers and fixes his gaze on Aeryn, then Crichton. "I meant comfortable for  _me_." He spins on his heel and makes for the cargo-hold door. As he goes, he snaps, "Lt. Gallara, have them brought to command."

* * *

As they make their way back up to the bridge, a powerful vibration flows through the ship and shakes the bulkheads for a couple of microts. Aeryn, who has lived aboard ships all her life, gives Crichton a worried look.

"S'matter, Scorpy?" asks John. "More than five-thousand since your last oil change?"

"That's his way of asking if you're having engine-trouble," supplies Aeryn, mostly for Lt. Gallara's benefit.

"Ah," says the young officer with sudden understanding. "And… if I may ask, what is a 'chicken'?"

Aeryn and Crichton both shoot Gallara the same queer look, but before either of them can answer, they arrive on the bridge. "In fact," says Scorpius as they all walk onto the command platform, "that was a gravitic distortion. It means that the wormhole at the center of this asteroid field… is about to open."

Crichton falls gravely silent, staring ahead at the empty space outside the ship's panoramic viewport.

"Scorpius," says Aeryn, "the treaty with the Scarrans bans all wormhole research—you know this. Frell, it's why you've spent most of the last six cycles working on dark energy and—and—after that didn't work—" she nudges Crichton and whispers, "what was the other thing?"

Crichton, distracted, starts at his wife's touch. "Hm? Oh, uh—heavy anti-leptons. Bombard some anti-tauons with Higgs bosons and you can build yourself a doomsday—"

"—Right, that," finishes Aeryn with a confident nod. "Wormholes are  _illegal_ , you cannot be back on wormholes!"

"All that you say is true," concedes Scorpius. "But we are not here for wormhole  _research_. This wormhole—we're going  _through_  it."

Aeryn snaps, "Like frell!" At the same time, Crichton shakes his head and says, "Won't work."

Scorpius suddenly has a predatory grin, like a Trallxian cave-viper toying with doomed prey. He eyeballs John Crichton. "You know this wormhole."

Aeryn looks askance at John, who nods, glum. "It's the first one I came through. When I met Moya. Aeryn. …Crais."

"You still have the ability to navigate wormholes," says Scorpius. A statement of cold, hard fact with no room for questions or protestations. Crichton tries anyway, but before his mouth is even open, Scorpius has grabbed Crichton by the shoulders and pushed him violently against the railing that surrounds the command platform. Lt. Gallara holds Aeryn Sun back while Scorpius hangs Crichton half-way over the command deck and hisses in his face. "Never forget this, Crichton: Neural Clone or not, reprogrammed, self-deleted after the War—brought back by the Nebari, expunged again by the Delvians—doesn't matter. I don't even need to observe your heat-signature to know when you're lying. You recognized this wormhole; you can lead us through it!"

"Can't, won't, take your pick!" retorts Crichton. He's still too weak to fight back physically, but he never yields. "That wormhole leads to Earth! I closed it from the other side—cut Earth off from the network!"

"What do you want with Earth?" demands Aeryn. She shrugs Gallara off; her strength is returning faster than Crichton's.

Scorpius looks at Aeryn as if she is the only other adult in the room, the only one he can reason with. He composes himself, helps Crichton back to his feet, and unhands him. "Commandant Sun, I remind you that your reinstated commission and elevated rank are still in effect. You served with distinction in the Peacekeeper Diplomatic Corps for six cycles after the War and led a great many successful negotiations." Aeryn starts to object, but Scorpius raises one gloved hand imperiously. "Your honorable discharge was conditional—the High Council can reactivate you in case of emergency, and the Eidelons have decided that this is an emergency."

"Oh, here we go," grumbles Crichton. "All right, Grasshopper, let's have the exposition-dump."

"I have been monitoring this wormhole on my own, in secret, for some time. Imagine my surprise, a third of a cycle ago, when I suddenly began to detect electromagnetic signals—of Human origin."

"Radio waves from Earth," says Crichton.

"Audiovisual broadcasts—your 'television'," affirms Scorpius. "Dated to your 'year', two-thousand and eleven. Eight cycles since your last visit home. The wormhole to Earth is open again."

Aeryn turns to Crichton. "Is that possible!?"

Crichton is already fuming. "Dumbasses…" he mutters. "It is if  _they_  tried to open again!"

"That was my assessment as well," says Scorpius. "Your fellow Humans, it would seem, have every intention of following you out into the galaxy—and becoming an interplanetary pain in the eema."

Crichton stares at Scorpius in long-suffering disbelief. "You want me to take us through so that I can close the wormhole again?"

"Impractical, if your species can re-open it at will. Instead, the High Council has asked that I lead a mission to deliver you and Commandant Sun to Earth, to establish formal diplomatic ties."

"This is a bad idea," asserts Aeryn. "It's only been eight cycles, they won't be ready."

"Too primitive, too paranoid, too suspicious, too dangerous," concludes Crichton.

"Possibly," admits Scorpius. "But the High Council, the Eidelons, and the Scarran Imperium are in agreement. Your species has begun to master wormhole technology. This poses a threat to the entire galaxy. It must be dealt with."

"'Dealt with'?" echoes Crichton. "And the Eidelons were on board with this?"

"They convinced the Council to seek a diplomatic solution first!" exclaims Scorpius. "That is why you and Aeryn Sun are here! To lead the negotiations, to convince your people that wormhole weapons research would be… ill-advised."

"And if they don't go for it?" asks John.

The silence of Scorpius in the moment that follows says everything Crichton needs to know.

"Fine," says John. "But I ain't helping. Go on; fly us in and turn us all to goo."

Scorpius turns to Aeryn. "Crichton is not the only one here who has piloted a vessel through a wormhole—"

"Eat 'shit'," says Aeryn, luxuriating in the use of a human profanity, the meaning of which is nevertheless apparent to all.

"There are four-hundred souls aboard this ship," says Scorpius. "You place all of their lives at risk—"

"Not this time!" retorts Crichton. "No. If you give the order that gets us all killed,  _I_  am not responsible for it!  _Aeryn_  is not responsible for it!"

"We are going into that wormhole, with or without your willing assistance," replies Scorpius with unnerving calm. "If you will not pilot the  _Conquistador_ … then we will simply have to rely on the Phase Stabilizer."

At the very same moment that Crichton stands up straight and says, "What!?", the wormhole out in space flares up like a bright blue prominence that quickly settles back down into a swirling, semi-stable funnel.

Scorpius gives a few terse orders to the techs down on the command deck. It is the Yufey'yet crewman who activates the ship's negative phase shielding—outside the ship, lines of pink energy streak across the hull in all directions, making an odd grid of irregularly-sized, triangular laser-beams, before the energy fades away again and becomes invisible—and a few microts later, the wormhole up ahead calms down and doesn't swirl like an angry vortex in the fabric of spacetime itself quite so much. It just hangs there placidly, a funnel through reality, awaiting a traveler.

"Helm, one-quarter ahead," instructs Scorpius. While Sub-Officer Nalu engages the sub-light engines that push the  _Conquistador_  to the mouth of the wormhole, Scorpius turns to Crichton. "Did you really imagine that I never knew about Furlow? After all, the Scarrans were the ones backing her research."

"Is she still alive?" asks Aeryn with genuine curiosity and perhaps more hope than compassion.

"In a manner of speaking," replies Scorpius. "But she isn't quite the same… brilliant researcher that you once knew."

Aeryn says nothing. Some small part of her is happy to get this news.

As for Crichton, his eyes are closed. Even after all these cycles, he can still hear the hum,  _smell_  the scent, feel the tingle. What the Ancients did to his brain was deep and irrevocable. This is who he is. Trance-like, he almost cannot help it, he starts to whisper instructions. "Left… left again… high and outside… now the middle one…"

The  _Conquistador_  has plunged into the tunnel, and every time Crichton whispers a direction, Scorpius relays it down to the Kalish pilot, who does her best to follow a path through the chaotic branches and confluences. Waves of exotic energies that would reduce the whole ship to particles or send it careening into the wall of the wormhole fly by; Nalu dodges most of these, but a few still clip the ship and break against the barrier born from Furlow's ingenious design and now re-purposed to Scorpius's ends. It is Crichton's guidance, through—however unwillingly given; he is naught but a medium for the knowledge now—that saves them from an exit into an unrealized reality, or a reversal into a white hole that erases every memory of their ever having existed in any continuum.

Aeryn thinks for a microt that she might perhaps be able to get Crichton to stop giving directions, if only she were to grab his hand or speak his name. But she does not do this, because she does not want to murder four-hundred Peacekeepers, and because she wants to see her children again and to have her children see their mother and father again. Even if it puts Earth at risk. She will never speak of this moment with Crichton, ever.

And suddenly, it's all over, and the  _Conquistador_  gives a violent shudder and slides back into real space. The wormhole is behind them, and the forward viewport is filled with the brilliance of a yellow dwarf star that John Crichton knows all too well. This is the Sun, his Sun, one that he has known all his life, grown up and lived and learned and loved underneath. The Sun that shines down on his father and his sisters and the rest of his family, and also on the grave of his mother—and that of his childhood best friend and his best friend's wife. Who both died because of that one time that he wanted nothing more than to come home to Earth but shouldn't have done so, and did so by accident anyway, even though by then it was too late for him to really call it home anymore.

He's home.

That thought is more than enough to snap him out of the trance. "Are we—?"

Without a word, Aeryn takes John by the arm and points. The  _Conquistador_  is coming about, facing away from the Sun and towards the Earth, which looms large—it's so close, it's  _huge_ , northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula and a small part of southern Europe fill the viewport—because Scorpius's ship is hanging in a relatively low orbit. They have exited the wormhole  _right on top of_  the planet Earth.

"Welcome home, John," says Scorpius in his best facsimile (it's still a poor one) of genuine affection. Then he turns to Lt. Gallara and says, "Lieutenant, log this order as binding and effective immediately, command code four-four-seven-dekka: all navigation and engineering personnel are to receive an official commendation."

Momentary looks of surprise and delight appear on the faces of the bridge crew—except for the Interion gunner, who cannot quite conceal his jealousy.

While the Peacekeepers go about the business of getting their bearings and taking their initial scans of the primitive planet below—or above; the way Crichton has to look up through the viewport, "above" seems more appropriate—Aeryn sidles up close to him. Scorpius has all of his attention fixed on Earth when Aeryn whispers, "It's been eight cycles."

"Yep," says John.

"You left them your recording-device on the Moon."

"Yep."

"And—your father did say that your people were starting to come together—" Aeryn is reaching now, and she knows it, "—so is there any chance that they might have—?"

"Nope," says Crichton. And it's God's honest truth. He genuinely doesn't expect much from his fellow humans. Could they really come together as a single people? Overcome their deep divisions, understand technology so far beyond them, and muster up even a meager defense? It's impossible and he knows it, and honestly so does Aeryn.

And so does Scorpius—he's counting on it.

Which is why the sudden appearance of another battleship, racing around from behind the shadow of the Moon, comes as such a surprise to all three of them.


	2. Chapter 2

One-hundred microts is time enough for everything to change forever.

One-hundred microts ago, John Crichton was still in the Uncharted Territories, and life was still his own weird and twisted version of "normal", and all of his worst fears for his planet were a distant and impossible bad dream: Earth subdued and humiliated, humanity conquered and enslaved, the planet's surface devastated from orbit by the power of a single Peacekeeper light cruiser. Millions dead, the rest powerless to stop it. John Crichton powerless to stop it.

John Crichton hell-bent on revenge, a thought that sickens and terrifies him, repulses him for its similarity to Scorpius, even though John knows that it's what would happen if those worst fears of his should ever come to pass.

But now there's a ship bearing down on them, and everything is different. It's gray and boxy and ugly, definitely a human construct, and John Crichton doubts very much that it can put up a real fight, but damned if his species isn't going to go down swinging. Humanity: fuck yeah.

The ship is actually a little bigger than the  _Conquistador_ , with two flight-pods on either flank that probably carry shuttlecraft or maybe even fighters. Scorpius stares at this ship, perplexed and intrigued, always calculating. "Scan that ship," he orders.

The officer manning the scanners stammers, "I—we can't, sir. Our scans aren't penetrating its defense screen."

Defense  _screen_ —singular. Scorpius doesn't miss that detail. "Raise our screens," he says, the tiniest hint of panic in his voice.

One-hundred microts ago, Scorpius had still been prepared to underestimate the Humans, even after they re-opened a sealed wormhole in their upper atmosphere; even after having known John frelling Crichton.

Out in space, two overlapping force-fields of angry red light form a twin bubble around the cruiser-explorer. Gaps exist in both energy-screens, but the dual arrangement ensures that no one section of the ship's hull is ever exposed to danger for more than a fraction of a microt.

Then, without warning, a beam of white-hot energy, or maybe it's plasma, lances forth from the angular gray Earth-ship. It strikes the  _Conquistador_  square on the bow, and both defense-screens dissolve like so much wet tissue-paper.

On the Peacekeeper ship's command deck, ordinarily disciplined officers verge on panic. Sparks fly and controls short out. The whole bridge rocks to and fro, and Lt. Gallara nearly pitches over the railing—it's Aeryn Sun who catches her.

Scorpius grips the rail and steadies himself. "Signal that ship!" he roars, his voice taking on a distinctly Scarran tone.

One of the Sebaceans down on the deck holds a headset up to his ear with one hand and grips the comms console firmly with the other. "Incoming transmission!" he announces.

The forward viewport ripples for a quarter of a microt; then the image of the Earth and its lone gray defender of a battleship are replaced by an interior view of that selfsame ship, a bridge with a command chair standing about a foot above the rest of the deck and maybe half a dozen humans in blue jumpsuits manning various duty-stations. The jumpsuits all have patches indicating flags from various nations, branches of military service (mostly Air Force), and a symbol on every shoulder that looks like a cross between a capital lambda and the Ångström symbol: ʌ̊.

Sitting in the chair is a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to our own John Crichton. His patches indicate the U.S. Air Force, a colonel no less. He speaks with easy authority: like he's been at this a while. "This is Colonel Cameron Mitchell, temporarily in command of the Earth Ship  _Odyssey_. You have violated Earth space; stand down and prepare to—holy crap on a cracker!  _John!?_ "

At the same time, Crichton grins wider than Aeryn has seen him grin since their daughters were born. "CAM!?  _Ha-hah!_ " he laughs aloud. Suddenly, everything isn't just different—it's better than he could have possibly imagined.

Aeryn regards this human with the confident military bearing and Crichton-like good looks and asks, "John, who is this man?"

"He's my cousin from Kansas!" exclaims Crichton, still laughing. And so it is—Cameron Mitchell, the son of John's mother's sister and a farmer from Kansas. An Air Force pilot with colonel's bars (just like his Uncle Jack, the famous astronaut). The one who didn't go for NASA or IASA or any other space agency… at least not at first. Cam, who used to go fishing with John and Livvy at Sawyer's Mill when they were kids, and was better than either of them at digging up nightcrawlers and baiting hooks.

On the bridge of the  _Odyssey_ , Colonel Mitchell orders his boat's weapons to stand down. He looks at John Crichton and Aeryn Sun—famous faces down on Earth, anyone would recognize them anywhere even after eight years' absence—and also at the ghoulish white figure in the black S&M suit standing next to them. Cam can't help but wonder what  _his_  deal is. "So… John. Long time, no see. What's goin' on?"

"Man, it's a  _long_  story," says Crichton. "Hey, how're—" he freezes, almost reluctant to ask the question. It's not that he doesn't want to talk about it in front of Scorpius and all the Peacekeepers, he doesn't give two shits about what they think; it's that it's been eight freaking years, and who knows what might've happened in the meantime. "How's my—?"

"Uncle Jack is fine," says Cam, answering the unasked question. "Just saw him at the annual Crichton family fourth of July barbecue three weeks ago."

John heaves a sigh and slumps against the railing of the command platform, visibly relieved. His dad is still alive. Getting up there in the years without a doubt, but still kicking, thank God.

"Guess I'm gonna have to get him on the horn here, huh?" says Cam.

"Guess so," says John. "Might want to call the President while you're at it."

Mitchell raises an eyebrow. "Emergency?"

"Diplomacy," answers Aeryn Sun in accented, unpracticed English. "The Peacekeepers want to negotiate… something. Apparently I'm the ambassador."

That's a new one for Cam. "'Apparently'?"

"Did we mention the long story?" says Crichton.

Scorpius has watched this whole exchange with cool detachment, observing everything, saying nothing. The reasons for this are many and practical: he does not want to interrupt the familial rapport, especially if he can use it to his advantage; he is beyond curious about the humans and this mysterious, mighty battleship of theirs; and he wonders whether they would even understand him if he were to speak. He knows that the Humans do not have translator microbes, or at least they didn't have them eight cycles ago, and his own small command of English, gleaned from his interactions with Crichton, may not be sufficient for the precision niceties of diplomacy.

Mitchell answers Crichton by eyeballing Scorpius and asks, "Friend of yours?"

Still Scorpius stares, silent and menacing. He wants to speak; Crichton can only guess at whatever machinations hold him back. "No, not really," he says at last. "But he's  _here_." Something about that last, tired utterance speaks of finality; inevitability; doom.

"All right, well—hang tight," says Cameron. He knows and John knows what must come next: bureaucracy. Red tape. Questions and paranoia and security measures. John doesn't blame his people for this—especially not now.

He has questions too. A whole hell of a lot of 'em.

* * *

Scorpius leaves Lt. Gallara in charge of the  _Conquistador_  for the duration of their short excursion over to the  _Odyssey_. He no longer needs his attaché to double as a nurse, not since Sikozu upgraded his cooling-rod system all those cycles ago. Now he can go for well over a solar day without having to replace any rods.

Sub-Officer Nalu pilots the Marauder carrying Scorpius, John, and Aeryn. Most of the trip is made in silence, until the Marauder comes close to the  _Odyssey's_  starboard-side flight-pod. The massive blast-doors slowly grind their way open, while at the same time a flash of soft yellow indicates a force-field appearing in the gap to prevent the flight-deck's exposure to hard vacuum. The jagged, tooth-like seam between the doors widens, and now the Peacekeepers can see that flight-deck, where there are six primitive-looking fighter-craft, like atmospheric jet-planes modified to fly in space, docked between painted lines on the floor. Techs and other personnel move about, carrying out their duties—looking so very Sebacean that to the Peacekeepers on the Marauder, only the colors of the uniforms are unfamiliar.

Scorpius finally breaks the silence. "A curious design choice," he muses aloud. John can't tell whether he's talking about the fighters or the cruiser-carrier or what. He still doesn't much care; he's just wondering how his species finally managed to pull all of this together in so short a time.

Aeryn Sun wonders the same. She leans over to John in her usual, protective way and whispers, "Is this…  _our_  reality?"

Scorpius hears her anyway and perks up, turns his head: he wants to know John's take on things.

"Doesn't matter," says Crichton simply.

"What do you mean, it doesn't matter?" says Aeryn.

"We exited a wormhole," says Crichton. "And we didn't travel back in time. So this  _is_  our reality, from now on. Hell, we've been back and forth so many times now that if we changed something…" Crichton is suddenly weary. He doesn't want to do this anymore. He's getting too old for this shit. "Look, just… keep your eyes peeled for, um, inconsistencies. The first 'wrong thing' you see, let me know."

Now the Marauder is passing through the force-field—there's only a slight shudder, as the small drop-ship is now flying through an air-pressurized hangar instead of empty space. Aeryn tilts her head towards the front of the Marauder, the forward viewport showing the flight-deck of the Earth ship, and says, "It's going to be hard to beat  _that_."

"Yep," says Crichton resignedly.

Scorpius silently agrees. But he also knows a Human aphorism which has served him well for the past eight cycles or so: if you cannot beat them, join them.

* * *

Two Air Force MPs in cammo and carrying FN-P90s escort John, Aeryn, and Scorpius into a spartan gray conference-room aboard the  _Odyssey_. Colonel Mitchell is already seated there, along with three other humans: a wiry bespectacled man with short-cropped hair and the stubbly beginnings of a full beard; and two tough- and intelligent-looking women in black tank-tops, one with short blonde hair and bright inquisitive eyes, and the other with long black hair that looks altogether too much like Aeryn's would if it were done up in pigtails.

Crichton pauses at the door and stares at this woman. He thinks for a moment that she really does look an awful lot like Aeryn. Then the strange woman blows a huge pink bubble with the bubble-gum she's chewing and lets the sticky mass explode all over her face. With a wide grin, she licks the gum back into her mouth and resumes chewing, loudly. That more or less dispels the illusion totally.

Cameron Mitchell stands up from his seat at the head of the table, but before he can greet the visitors, he mumbles, "Vala, could you not, please?"

With a petulant pout, the woman with the chewing gum pulls the wad out of her mouth and flicks it into the corner of the conference-room.

Mitchell rolls his eyes and turns back to John. "I s'pose introductions are in order. Of course you know Colonel Sam Carter—"

"We've met," says John with a nod. "The IASA conference back in '96. And at Canaveral, last time I was on Earth."

"I'm flattered you remember," says Samantha Carter politely. She does not sound flattered.

"—and this is Dr. Daniel Jackson," continues Cameron. "He's our resident linguist and cultural expert."

Jackson nods. "Dr. Crichton. Good to finally meet you." He turns to greet Aeryn Sun as well, but thinks better of it: Aeryn isn't really paying attention. She has already sat herself down at the conference table, across from Vala Mal Doran. They are now staring at each other, Aeryn with the appraising eyes of a soldier or an assassin, Vala with the perceptive gaze of a grifter or a pickpocket sizing up a potential mark.

"And this," says Cameron, "is Vala Mal Doran. She's… uh…"

"Just here to observe," offers Vala. She gives John Crichton a leering look—and why not? He's a handsome, famous hero, a bona fide celebrity, and apparently the long-lost cousin of her dear friend and colleague Cameron. There could be  _possibilities_  here.

Vala's roving eyes earn her a stone cold death-glare from Aeryn Sun, whose hand once again drifts down to her still-empty holster. This makes Aeryn even more annoyed.

"Right," says John, pretending to be a little bit more clueless than he actually is. "I guess you all know who I am, and you remember Aeryn Sun," he clears his throat and looks pointedly at Vala, "we're married, by the way. And this cadaverous bastard here is called Scorpius. He's a bigwig with the Peacekeepers."

Scorpius has so far noted many interesting details. The mix of primitive and mind-blowingly advanced technologies married together in the construction of this ship. The fact that most of the Humans aboard, including the guards armed with slug-throwers, are unnerved by his appearance. And the fact that  _these_  four humans aren't rattled at all. They are, in a word, formidable.

"I am here," says Scorpius as he casually takes a seat at the table across from Mitchell, "to deliver a message to Earth from the Peacekeeper High Council, the Scarran Imperium, and the High Priesthood of the Eidelons. Do you speak on behalf of your planet?"

Cameron sizes up the menacing, Nosferatu-looking alien and says, "Nope, not really. We just want to get your side of the story, for starters. You'll meet the real diplomats and politicians later."

Scorpius notes that Colonel Mitchell has understood him perfectly, even though he has spoken in Sebacean rather than Crichton's language. He wonders: translator microbes? Something else? Well, it doesn't matter. They can communicate.

Which is good, thinks Scorpius, because that puts his second most powerful weapon—of course his intellect is his first—back at his disposal.

"This is to be an interrogation, then?" asks Scorpius.

"No. Just an informal meeting," says Dr. Jackson. "We have some questions. You probably do too."

Crichton finally takes a seat at the table, next to Aeryn and across from Daniel. "You bet your ass I do. Why'd you re-open the wormhole?"

The other humans in the room fall silent; only Vala manages not to look guilty, but then, that's probably because she has no idea what Crichton is talking about.

"Yeah… that was our bad," says Jackson. "It was kind of an accident."

"You  _accidentally_  re-opened the wormhole that John destroyed?" scoffs Aeryn. "How the frell did you manage that?"

Jackson looks from Carter to Mitchell—something holds him back. Mitchell tells him, "Need to know, Jackson."

"If Dr. Crichton can help us close it up again, I think he needs to know," says Carter. "We'll get the President to give him security clearance later."

Mitchell thinks for a moment, then relents and gives Jackson a subtle nod.

Jackson sighs. "All right. Well… a few months ago, we kind of used a wormhole to bring the Lost City of Atlantis back to Earth from another planet in the Pegasus Galaxy, so that we could stop an invasion of life-force-sucking aliens called the Wraith, who also come from the Pegasus Galaxy."

Crichton stares. "The lost city. Of Atlantis."

Carter finishes for him, "Was in another galaxy. And when we moved it here with an experimental wormhole drive, I'm pretty sure it weakened the local spacetime around the wormhole you closed back in '04. Kind of… tore everything open again. Took us a few months before we even noticed that it had happened."

By now, Scorpius is as intrigued as Crichton is incredulous. "Are you claiming that your species has harnessed wormhole technology—for intergalactic travel!?"

Samantha quirks an eyebrow and looks at Scorpius smugly. Here, she realizes, is another alien of some authority who has underestimated humanity. "I've been to two other galaxies myself, Pegasus and Ida. Daniel and Vala here have also been to the Caelum Galaxy, where the Ancients originally came from."

Daniel puts up a finger of protest and points out, "Actually, Vala's the only one of us who ever went there physically, I only had my consciousness projected into—" but his voice is very quickly drowned out when both Scorpius and Crichton stand up in surprise. "The Ancients?" echoes Scorpius; and Crichton asks, "How do you know about the Ancients!?"

"How do you?" asks Mitchell.

Crichton looks his cousin in the eye. "Met some. Out there. It was a while ago."

In that moment, Scorpius makes a calculated decision. He knows Crichton's reluctance all too well, and he knows exactly how much Crichton values his people. He thinks so little of them—and, because of this, despite this, he wants desperately to protect his fellow Humans from themselves. "The Ancients," says Scorpius, resuming his seat, "once downloaded all of their vast wormhole knowledge—into John Crichton's brain. Though he may deny it, I believe that he still possesses this knowledge, if only on a subconscious level."

Aeryn hisses something at Scorpius in Sebacean, so nasty that it doesn't translate. Jackson looks thoughtful, Carter looks surprised and elated and a little bit too eager, and Mitchell just looks hurt.

"You weren't gonna tell us that, were you?" asks Cam.

And John Crichton, with one of the bigger cats still left in his considerable bag suddenly let out, finds himself in a position that he never wanted to be in: having to justify himself and his decision to keep some things from his people, even his family, for their own good. "It's dangerous," he says simply.

"Help us make it less dangerous," says Carter.

"I… can't," says John. "The knowledge isn't mine to give away."

Mitchell rolls his eyes. "We've heard  _that_  before…"

Jackson holds up a hand to stop Mitchell—he wants to try another tactic. "You believe that if the Ancients were here right now, they wouldn't want you to share this technology with Earth."

"I know it for a fact," says Crichton. He glares at Jackson, who finds himself looking back into the eyes of a man speaking hard truth founded in harder experience.

Still, Daniel is never one to give up on his idealism. He turns to Carter and says, "I think it's time to tell him everything."

"Everything?" she asks, eyes wide.

Jackson nods.

Cater sighs and rises from the table. "All right. I'll talk to General O'Neill and the President." As she moves to leave the conference room, she pauses and says to Crichton, "Oh—and your father works for the I.O.A. now, so he already has full clearance. We'll get word to him that you're back and have him beamed up to the  _Odyssey_  in a jiffy."

Scorpius and Aeryn think nothing of this, and even Crichton misses it for about two-point-five seconds. "Wait—did she just say ' _beamed_ '!?"

* * *

Sub-Officer Nalu had earlier been instructed to stay with the Marauder, but after the Human guards came to escort Scorpius, Commandant Sun, and John Crichton to go meet with the commander of the Human ship, the Kalish pilot was herself escorted to the  _Odyssey's_  commissary and offered refreshment. Since it was not her time of the cycle to feed, this was a pointless endeavor. Still, it offered her the chance to observe the Humans, to ingratiate herself with all the flirtatious males (there were rather more males than females serving aboard this vessel; how very unlike the Peacekeepers the Humans were in that regard), and perhaps to gather intelligence.

Scorpius appreciated underlings who took initiative.

Thus, her time in the commissary was spent talking, flirting, waiting, and concealing abject boredom; but not eating.

After a surprisingly short while, however, the ship-commander himself, Colonel Mitchell, now arrives, along with Scorpius, Sun, and Crichton, and two other humans. Both Mitchell and this other human male look rather like Crichton—this is to be expected, for a species that only inhabits one planet—but the human female accompanying them looks  _shockingly_  like Commandant Sun. That is… rather unexpected.

Quite unable to help herself, Sub-Officer Nalu stares, open-mouthed, at the pair of Commandant Aeryn Sun and Vala Mal Doran, who are still each giving the other the stink-eye when one thinks that the other isn't looking.

Scorpius approaches Nalu and says in a quiet, commanding voice, "Return with me to the Marauder and prepare for our immediate departure. I must send a communiqué back through the wormhole, in person."

Crichton, making no bones about the fact that everyone in the room can still hear Scorpius, stands next to his cousin and says loudly, "We'll stay here for a bit, if you don't mind."

"Of course," says Scorpius diplomatically. "Take all the time you need to… catch up." He nods at Aeryn—"Commandant." Then he and Nalu depart (escorted, of course, by a pair of silent Human guards).

"'Commandant'?" echoes Mitchell, once Scorpius is gone.

"Not like Stalag 13," says Crichton. "It's more like a bad translation of 'Commodore'."

"Still, heck of a promotion," says Mitchell. "Since it was 'Officer Ex-Peacekeeper Aeryn Sun' the last time you were here."

"Things changed," says Aeryn. "Long story."

"Yeah, no kidding," says Cam. He indicates Aeryn's hand. "Is that Aunt Leslie's ring?"

"Dad gave it to me when I left," says John. He then points between Aeryn and himself and says, "We got hitched during the—" Crichton pauses, realizing that he can't just say "the War", because that wouldn't meaning anything to his fellow Earthlings.

"—During the Battle of Qujaga," supplies Aeryn. "At the height of the Peacekeeper–Scarran War, nearly eight cycles ago."

"Damn," says Mitchell, shaking his head. A small smile forms on his face. "Kids?"

"Three," affirms John. "Boy and two girls. Deke is eight; Katy and Zhaan are five."

"'Zhaan'," says Daniel, cutting into the conversation. He and Carter have both retrieved trays of food and sat down nearby. "That's an interesting name. Is it Sebacean?"

"Delvian," says Aeryn.

"It's another long story," says Crichton.

"You seem to be full of those," says Cam.

Crichton stares out the window at the curvature of the Earth—he can just make out the coast of Australia from here. "Pot. Kettle."

"Fair enough," says Cam. He motions for everyone to get comfortable and sits. "Who wants to start? Jackson, you've been here from the beginning—"

"I figured you were going to say something like that," Daniel mutters. "All right, well… it all started back in 1995, the first time I met Dr. Catherine Langford…"

* * *

Jackson spends the next two hours bringing Crichton and Aeryn up to speed on the secret history of Earth and its many, many, many contacts with extraterrestrial life down through the millennia—but especially over the course of the last decade and change. He talks about the Ancients, and the Asgard, and the Goa'uld, and the Tok'ra, and the Replicators, and the Wraith, and the Ori. He tells them about the Stargate, the first mission to Abydos, and Jack O'Neill (a colonel back then). Ra, Apophis, Hathor, Setesh, Heru'ur, Sokar, Nirti, Lord Yu, Anubis. Oisiris—a sore subject, to be sure, but not as sore as Sha're. He tells them of Skaara and Kasuf. Of Teal'c and Bra'tac and Chulak and the Jaffa. General Hammond, General Carter (and Selmak, of course), and General Landry.

He talks about the Ancients—Heliopolis, "meaning of life type stuff". When Crichton mentions that the Ancients he knew were either bug people or creepy wormhole-aliens, Jackson gets very excited for a moment and shows Crichton some writing—four examples, from Heliopolis, those being Alteran, Asgard, Nox, and Furling. The Furling inscriptions, Crichton recognizes right away, because the wormhole equations in his brain are written in those very same dots and squiggles. He discovers then and there that his Ancients are properly known as Furlings, and Jackson and Carter likewise discover that it must have been the Furlings who originally provided the wormhole technology used by  _their_  Ancients, the humanlike Alterans, when they originally built the Stargates. Mitchell and Vala discover to their disappointment that the Furlings are not and never were furry, or even the least bit cute.

Carter at one point mentions that the same solar flare storm back in 1999 that sent John Crichton to the far side of the galaxy also messed with their wormholes at the SGC—and that SG-1 got sent back to the year 1969 by a solar flare at roughly the same time. Maybe it was even the exact same flare—which wouldn't be terribly important, but was kind of funny think about, and it drives home the point for Crichton that on the very day he had his accident, the SGC had already been in operation for a full two years. It's Carter's way of saying that they kind of know what they're doing—that her wormhole knowledge might be on par with Crichton's, and she's earned it the old-fashioned way.

To say nothing of Radek Zelenka, who figured out the Ancient wormhole drive that moved Atlantis back to Earth (and accidentally tore Crichton's closed wormhole all the way open again), or Rodney McKay, who helped design the McKay-Carter Gate Bridge between Milky Way and Pegasus.

Carter also takes over the story, briefly, to talk in more detail about the fight with Anubis and the quest for the Eye of Ra and the year that Daniel spent dead (or ascended), with Jonas Quinn of Langara holding his position on SG-1. That was 2003 into 2004, the distraction that kept the SGC entirely occupied during the months that Sikozu Shanu was communicating with Earth from aboard Moya, and then the months that John Crichton and Aeryn Sun and Ka D'Argo and Chiana and Dominar Rygel XVI and Utu-Noranti Pralatong spent  _on_  Earth, being heroic and alien and generally world-famous and also terrifying and causing mass hysteria and changing everything about humanity's place in the cosmos forever.

To the personnel of the SGC, who had much more pressing matters to deal with at the time, it was a minor nuisance. An irritant. And, ever since then, a fantastically useful source of plausible deniability, so that they could continue their massive government cover-up until the day when they deemed that the world was ready to know the truth—or until the cover-up became so impractical that full disclosure was inevitable and imminent, and they needed to get out ahead of any press leaks.

Mitchell talks about Inauguration Day in January of 2005, roughly a year after Crichton's visit home, and about piloting an F-302 in the dogfight over Antarctica with Anubis's Death Gliders. Getting shot down, months of physical therapy. His posting to SG-1 afterwards, a small reward well-earned for heroics performed in the line of duty. Crichton detects a hint of bitterness in his cousin's voice when he talks about this experience.

Crichton and Aeryn hear a great deal about Stargates and ascended beings, the Ori and their worshipers, Priors and Doci and crusading knights, of higher planes of pure energy and perfect thought. It's only then that John Crichton starts to open up to them about the dangers of wormholes, time travel and unrealized realities, Einstein and the "Ancients"—members of that mysterious species, "heavily modified" to exist in our physical realm, and their great fear of the fact that wormholes can reach  _theirs_. About how the "biologics" of our universe are infinitely more aggressive than they are. Carter elucidates the difference between Crichton's wormholes, bigger than starships, floating in space—Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridges, she calls them—and the Stargates' wormholes, barely bigger than an atomic nucleus, so small that matter has to be demolecularized and compressed into a data-stream to be sent through, and even then the matter-stream can only pass through the wormhole one way—extreme Kerr singularities, torus-shaped in four dimensions and 150 femtometers across, and you never even think about their being there because the shimmery blue "event horizon" of the 'gate itself is amazing and beautiful and kind of dangerous (but not as dangerous as the unstable vortex that goes "kawoosh!"—and suddenly both Crichton and Aeryn are rather eager to see the "kawoosh" for themselves).

And then Vala brings the story to a close by joking about how awful and primitive the Earth people's first ship, the  _Prometheus_  was, and what an easy time she had of stealing it right out from underneath her darling Daniel's nose, at least for a while, until he stole it back from her. How the  _Prometheus_  was lost in the war with the Ori, but now Earth has the mighty  _Daedalus_  class ships, the envy of the civilized galaxy— _Apollo_  and  _Korolev_  and  _Sun Tzu_  and  _General George Hammond_ , and this ship, the most important one of all, because the  _Odyssey_  carries within it the legacy of the Asgard and all the technology that makes humans the Fifth Race of the Great Alliance. Intergalactic hyperdrives and phased-plasma beams and impenetrable shields and power-sources undreamed of by any save the Ancients themselves.

This is when Crichton at last begins to understand: he needs a wormhole to get home, but home has had ships that can come to  _him_ , quite literally for  _years_. Hell, they probably don't even  _need_ his help—they probably don't even need him to close the wormhole  _for_ them. Carter is a genius, and McKay is a genius, and Zelenka is a genius, and they're just Earth's top three. His planet really could muster up the brainpower if it needed to; his help would just make everything that much easier on them, and maybe just a little less prone to massive catastrophe to boot.

They're not really depending on the Great John Crichton to get the job done; they're just asking him to speed the process along and minimize the risks. And that's the most liberating thought that he's had this entire time.

But then,  _that_ —good timing, as always—is when Colonel Jack Crichton appears inside the  _Odyssey's_  mess hall in a flash of white light and to the hum of an Asgard transporter.


	3. Chapter 3

"Dad!"

"John!" Instantly, they're embracing, and Jack says, "I've missed you, son—you can't even imagine—and I have so much to tell you!"

"Cam's been filling me in," says John. "It's…" He trails off because he doesn't have the words.

"I know!" says Jack with a small chuckle. "Imagine when I found out! I was the head of the Department of Extraterrestrial Studies—top clearance!—and then one day General O'Neill himself walks into my office, and he tells me that he's actually secretly in charge of Homeworld Security, and I'm supposed to replace Richard Woolsey as the new American representative to the International Oversight Advisory." He pauses, more for breath than for effect, but even still, he can barely believe his own story: "'Oversight of what?' I ask, and he looks me in the eye and says, 'Let me tell you all about the Stargate.' Wait until you see it, John—compared to the 'gate, this ship is a tinker-toy!"

Aeryn steps in at this point—of course she's missed Jack too, he was always more understanding of her than the other Humans—"That's difficult to believe. This ship disabled a Peacekeeper cruiser with a single shot!"

"Aeryn Sun!" says Jack with a full-throated laugh, hugging her too. Of course he doesn't miss the ring on her finger. "We're gonna have to take an evening sometime, so you can tell me all about my grandkids! At least, I'm assuming—"

"A boy and two girls," says Aeryn with a dazzling smile. She intentionally echoes John's phrasing from earlier, because she assumes that must be how Humans discuss such things.

Jack's grin lights up the room. It's just about then, too, that he lays eyes for the first time on Vala Mal Doran, who hangs off Daniel Jackson's arm while Jackson furiously scrolls through images of Furling script on an Atlantean tablet-computer.

"You must be Vala," he says, offering his hand and all his distinguished Southern charm. "I've heard a lot about you, but I never—" He smiles and shakes his head; it's impossible to ignore it. "—I'm sorry, but it's incredible! You and Aeryn could practically be twins!"

"Yes, I've noticed," says Vala. "And I'll bet there's a way to cash in on my uncanny resemblance to a famous celebrity. I think you call it… 'cosplay'? Am I saying that right?"

Vala directs her question at Daniel, who looks up from his tablet and pauses to consider the interesting possibility with furrowed brow and pursed lips for all of one second, then shakes his head and silently mouths the word "no".

Jack, meanwhile, has moved over to Cameron so that he can shake his nephew's hand. "Cam."

"Uncle Jack."

"Have you and John—?"

"We'll talk later," says Cam. "Probably best to get back to down to business for now."

"Sure," says Jack. "John, what can you tell me about this—this Scorpius fella?"

"How many days we got?" says John with a roll of his eyes. "All you really need to know is this: you can't trust the sneaky son of a bitch. He's high up in the Peacekeepers—he doesn't have a rank, or as much authority as an admiral, but he's got a lot of clout for helping end the War—and he always, always,  _always_  has his own agenda."

"So what does he want?" asks Jack.

"We don't really know," says Aeryn. "He hasn't let us in on the whole story yet—and I'm supposed to be the  _frelling_  ambassador!"

Jack nods. "All right. Well, the formal talks will take place on Atlantis, with me, O'Neill, and Woolsey speaking for Earth. If all he wants to do is lay the foundation for diplomatic ties, well and good, but if he wants something more—"

"At first, his job was to try and talk Earth out of using wormhole technology and developing super-weapons," says John. "But now that he's seen the  _Odyssey_? If he finds out about the Stargates?" He shakes his head. "Who the hell even knows?"

"We have to assume that he's telling the High Council about everything he's learned so far," says Aeryn.

"And if they get spooked?" asks Jack. "Will they attack?"

"They can't," says John. "Not yet. Peacekeeper ships aren't fast enough to make it here inside of fifty, sixty years. And Scorpy's boat is the only one that can make it through the wormhole in one piece—unless they ask the Scarrans for help."

"But Scorpius despises the Scarrans," Aeryn points out. "He would only ask them to send a Stryker if he wants to watch your beam-weapons swat it out of the sky."

"Bastard might just do that out of spite," mutters John. "Not that it matters—they wouldn't come. The Scarrans have their own problems these days." And how: seven cycles ago, after signing a truce with the Peacekeepers, the Scarrans were in a position of great diplomatic and military strength. Possibly their peak. Five cycles ago, conflict with the Nebari weakened their military, and the Scarrans also suddenly discovered that making genocidal war on the Peacekeepers had caused their list of allies to dwindle. Three cycles ago, the Kkore invaded from Grey Space—which wasn't nearly as big a deal as some of the fictitious accounts still floating around the Uncharted Territories made it out to be, and certainly didn't provoke a war that brought the Peacekeepers or the Scarrans to their knees; but it did leave the Scarrans shy two planets capable of growing Crystherium matriarchs. And nowadays, for at least the last cycle or so, the Scarrans have been fighting a mysterious new enemy on their far border, beyond Tormented Space, in a region known only as "the Great Void"—and they have not yet told the Peacekeepers or anyone else precisely  _what_  it is that they're fighting. John Crichton doesn't bother explaining any of this to his father—it's not really relevant at the moment—but it is quite accurate to say that the Scarrans have their own problems these days.

Jack nods with understanding. "Sounds to me like we've been dealt a lucky hand—this time. Still, General O'Neill's gonna want to play it close to the vest."

"That would be wise," says Aeryn. "Oh—and tell whoever is in charge of security on this ship to be on highest alert." She looks poignantly at Colonel Mitchell and says, "Your weapons and defenses are far superior to Peacekeepers or Scarrans. That means that Scorpius will desire  _this ship_  above all else."

"You think he'll try something stupid?" asks Cameron.

"Scorpius doesn't really do 'stupid'," says John. "He's more an 'evil chessmaster' kind of guy. Just… keep your eyes peeled and watch your ass."

* * *

Some time later, the whole party beams down to Atlantis, which still floats in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, still cloaked and thereby hidden from prying eyes and satellite photography. The Ancient city bustles with scientists from around the world, I.O.A. bureaucrats, U.S. Navy and Air Force personnel, and more than a few Athosians from Pegasus. Jack and John Crichton, Aeryn Sun, Cam Mitchell, Vala Mal Doran, Daniel Jackson, and Samantha Carter are all deposited in the very gate-room of the city's central spire, where Richard Woolsey and General O'Neill await them. Now they are surrounded by this bright and open and impossibly clean alien architecture, odd angles everywhere, all steps and lights and windows, and beyond those in every direction a fantastic view of the outward-jutting spokes of the awesome city-ship…

Woolsey steps forward and offers his hand to the newcomers. "Commander Crichton. Commandant Sun. An honor to meet you both."

O'Neill is less diplomatic. He shakes their hands, but says little; the distrust is palpable. It's obvious right away that the general doesn't think much of Crichton, and he'd just as soon ignore Crichton's nonhuman wife, except that she's the alien ambassador he's been brought here to deal with. "Dr. Crichton. Mrs. Crichton. I'm told there's beer and pizza, if you haven't eaten yet—"

"We're good, thanks," says John. "If you don't mind, I'd kind of like to get this over with."

O'Neill's estimation of Crichton ticks up a notch. "Sounds like a plan. But before we invite this 'Scorpion' character down here—"

"It's 'Scorpius', and of course we'll tell you everything we know," offers Aeryn.

"I'm sure you will," says O'Neill with a polite smile. "But I was going to say, first we need to wait for a few others to arrive." He turns to John's father and asks, "Has he seen the 'gate work yet?"

Jack Crichton shakes his head. "Who are we expecting?"

"Oh, the usual," answers O'Neill. "Some old friends, some new faces." He shouts up to the control room, "Hey Walter! When you get the call from Landry, light it up!"

Some young man in a Navy uniform who is most definitely not Sgt. Walter Harriman shouts down from the control room, "Sgt. Harriman is still at the SGC  _with_  General Landry, sir!"

O'Neill makes a forceful pointing gesture at the gate.

The Navy technician, who has already been informed that the SGC has suspended 'gate operations for the next few hours, ducks back into the control room and re-inserts a special control-crystal into the Atlantis gate's dialing device. Since the Atlantis gate is relatively new—it's only ten-thousand years old, unlike the millions-of-years-old gate in Cheyenne Mountain—it supersedes the one at the SGC and becomes Earth's active Stargate for the time being.

While Richard Woolsey and Jack O'Neill question Crichton and Aeryn in a nearby briefing-room that overlooks the gate-room, the next hour sees several alien dignitaries arrive—Teal'c and Bra'tac, representing the Free Jaffa (the first time John sees the Stargate open, he nearly falls out of his chair); Lya of the Nox; and a contingent of three solemn-looking Tok'ra. Each are greeted in turn by Carter and Daniel, who then lead them into yet another room, a huge conference-chamber where the first talks between Earth and Peacekeepers will shortly take place.

It helps to have awesome weapons when you want to show strength; it helps to have both awesome weapons and many loyal allies when you want to show  _overwhelming_  strength.

As the afternoon wears on into evening, and the diplomats discuss their plans, Crichton suddenly finds himself spared from being the center of attention for a moment. Mitchell appears behind him with two frosty beers, already open, and indicates one of Atlantis's spectacular balconies with a tilt of his head.

"Figured you could use a cold one," he says, handing one of the bottles to John.

John accepts it gratefully and takes a long pull. "Fellip nectar ain't got nothing on the real thing."

"Do I want to know?" asks Cameron.

John gazes out over the Pacific Ocean—it's far more peaceful than Hyneria's oceans, what with all of Hyneria Prime's flying vehicles and mass traffic and anomalous odors—and shakes his head. "Not really, no."

Cameron falls silent. It's obvious that he wants to say something, but he can't quite find the words. He stares at John, until John can't take it anymore. "What?"

"Why didn't you come back?" asks Cam.

"Why didn't  _you_  come find me?" John shoots back. "Hell, ya could've. You've got ships that'll make the Kessel Run in less than five parsecs!"

"Not back then we didn't!" says Cam. "While you were here on Earth, having dinner with the President and going on world-tours with your alien buddies? Carter and Quinn were taking the  _Prometheus_  out on its shakedown run!"

Crichton snorts and leans on the balcony. "Nobody told  _me_. They just paraded us around and made us all think that it was First Contact For Real—but, what, what were we, part of the cover-up? The shiny coin in Houdini's left hand, so nobody could see the right one picking fights with—with 'Goolds' and Wraiths?"

Cam nods. "Yeah, something like that. The brass decided that was how it had to be. That way, with you running around out there," he waves a hand at the sky like it's nothing, "playing hero, the  _real_  heroes could be right here—"

"Oh, give me a break," mutters John, ready to storm off then and there.

"—Right here at home," continues Cameron forcefully, "defending the Earth and saving the goddamned galaxy! Three evil empires, four if you count the Replicators; I've lost count of how many alien invasions—"

"Yeah, big damn heroes, poking the hornets' nest with a stick!" John shouts. "Maybe I only saved the galaxy  _once_ —" he pauses, thinks for a second, "—twice if you count the Nebari, and you really can't count the Kkore—but I'm just one guy with a kickass wife and three kids to take care of! I've done my part, we paid our dues, and now I'm off the frelling clock!"

Cameron pauses. With a small smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes, he asks, "'Frelling'?"

"Don't change the subject, we're arguing," says John. "I mean, what do you want from me, Cam? Are you jealous—is that it? I get to be world-famous for having the  _dumbest_  frelling luck, and you've gotta keep all  _your_  alien crap secret?"

"What about you?" Cam retorts. "Jealous that your 'big accomplishment' is a footnote next to the SGC?"

"God," snorts John, voice dripping with disdain, "—you know, you were always like this, even when we were kids—"

"Yeah, well you've changed." Cam takes a moment to finish his beer and says, "You know, I did ask, after you left."

"Ask what?"

"When I got shot down over Antarctica. They offered me anything I wanted. A personal favor, from the U.S. government to yours truly, for saving SG-1's bacon and the planet to boot." He sets his bottle down very carefully on the floor of the balcony and leaves one finger on the neck of it for just a moment before standing up again. "The first thing I asked for was, can we take the  _Prometheus_ , with its shiny new Asgard hyperdrive, and go find my cousin John and bring him home?"

John folds his arms, waiting for Cam to finish.

Cam leans backwards, resting his elbows on the balcony. "They said, no can do, we only have the one ship, the  _Daedalus_  is still on the drawing board. We need  _Prometheus_  to defend Earth. I was ordered to let it go, and I got my second wish, command of SG-1." Then Cameron looks John in the eye and tells him, "But Uncle Jack? He never let it go. As soon as he found out the truth, he called in every favor, talked to anyone with clearance who would listen. 'Bring my boy home, he's a hero, the lost astronaut, and we don't leave people behind.'"

John glances out to the horizon, where the sun is starting to set now—everything is the color of coral and rose. "But they didn't go for it."

"Nope. Year after year, he asked, but we always needed all our ships on the home-front. If it wasn't Goa'uld or Replicators, it was Ori or Wraith or Lucians… and anyway, your stomping-grounds are way out in the boondocks. You don't even have Stargates."

That makes Crichton laugh: bitter, sure, but also genuine. "Ain't that a kick in the pants. Here, I thought Earth was the backwater, and it turns out it's been the bright center of the universe all along."

The sun is dipping below the horizon now and painting a truly dazzling display for the observers on Atlantis. Just then, Aeryn Sun appears on the balcony, crosses the short distance over to John, and throws her arm around him. "Are you done comparing mivonks yet? We're almost ready to get started."

John and Cameron are both nonplussed to see Aeryn wearing USAF-issue workout clothes. "Where've you been?" John asks.

"In one of your training-facilities, sparring with the Jaffa ambassador—Teal'c?—He's very formidable."

"How'd you do?" asks Cam, amused.

Aeryn hesitates before admitting, "We fought to a standstill." She then kisses John on the cheek and says, "I'm going to go get changed. Meet us back in the conference-room in a quarter-arn."

As she leaves, John shakes his head, and Cameron chuckles, "Hell of a woman."

* * *

Just after sundown, Aeryn Sun (in full Peacekeeper uniform) stands with John Crichton and none other than Teal'c of Chulak on one of Atlantis's many landing-pads for small transport ships, nothing much bigger than a Puddle Jumper. Teal'c wears his ceremonial Jaffa robes, and John Crichton has been placed (more or less unwillingly) into the formal attire his people, the "suit and tie".

Crichton itches his neck under the collar—he hasn't worn such a thing in roughly eight cycles, unless you count that one mind-frell three cycles back involving the Szetturlian Tenticula, and Crichton really doesn't want to count that because counting it would involve remembering it—but he otherwise doesn't fidget or show any other signs of nervousness. He isn't nervous: this is an old song-and-dance routine for him now. And he's never in all his life had better backup.

The Marauder from the  _Conquistador_ , guided by an F-302 and a Puddle Jumper, appears in the night sky—on the platform, Aeryn Sun and the others can only just make out the ships' running-lights. The 302, never missing a beat, peels back up into orbit, where it will soon land back on the  _Odyssey_ ; while the Jumper continues to lead the Marauder, the blind leading the blind, through Atlantis's cloaking shield. Once they are inside the dome, they can see the designated landing site: while the Jumper heads off to dock in its proper bay, the Marauder touches down gently a short distance away from the welcoming party.

The drop-ship's hatch opens up: Scorpius descends first, followed by Lt. Gallara, Officer Loornag (the Interion gunner), Sub-Officer Nalu (the Kalish pilot), and four commandos in armor. The eight Peacekeepers march up to Aeryn; all but Scorpius salute her. She salutes back.

Scorpius has his gaze fixed on Teal'c. The Jaffa warrior has kept his expression neutral this entire time, but now he attempts a friendly smile. It still manages to look intimidating. "This way," he says, with a respectful half-bow of his head.

Scorpius returns the nod, and the Peacekeepers follow Aeryn, Crichton, and Teal'c into the central spire of Atlantis.

* * *

Teal'c leads the Peacekeeper party through one of Atlantis's bright, eerie corridors. The tall windows here permit a view of the city's towers, lit up against the dark of night. The Humans of Earth are active throughout the city, studying it, learning all they can, and learning quickly.

They come to a door, guarded by MPs; Teal'c turns and says, "Weapons are forbidden beyond this point. Your soldiers must remain here if they wish to remain armed."

Scorpius quietly tells the four commandos to remain here, along with Officer Loornag. Gallara, of course, expects to remain at Scorpius's side; she surrenders her pulse pistol to Teal'c, who gives it to one of the Human guards. Nalu is surprised when Scorpius instructs her to give up her sidearm as well and accompany them beyond the checkpoint: he tells the Kalish pilot to remain alert and observe everything.

This is no act of sentimental fondness on the part of Scorpius, but a calculation, as always.

They now go into the antechamber beyond, where a formal gathering, Earth-style, has been set up with all the accouterments; catering tables laden with refreshments, flags of the nations and military organizations of Earth, bunting.

It's so downright swanky that Crichton half expects a string quartet in powdered wigs, instead of the softly anodyne Muzak playing over the intercom.

O'Neill, Woolsey, and Mitchell are waiting by the punch-bowl. "Don't look now," whispers Mitchell to the general, "and don't say I didn't warn you."

O'Neill glances at the door, where Crichton and Aeryn have moved away from the Peacekeepers to mingle with the other guests, and Teal'c has gone off to find Bra'tac. Scorpius stands just inside the doorway, silent, watching, flanked by the two females in red-and-black uniforms: one Sebacean, the other belonging to the same race as one of Crichton's former shipmates on Moya, the unpleasant orange one—something Shamu, Jack is pretty sure he's got that right.

He can't resist whispering, "Holy mother of—" Mitchell undersold it. "Wrinkly vampire guy in a cyber-S&M-suit" didn't nearly do justice to just how  _unnerving_  Scorpius looked in person. And this is who the Peacekeepers send to negotiate with people?

Suddenly, Scorpius's eyes are on Jack O'Neill, fixated on him, and he's walking across the room, his girls on his heel.

 _Well_ , thinks Jack,  _I've faced down worse._  He braces himself, tries to remember what Crichton said about "energy signatures", and tries to remember that he's supposed to be a diplomat here—

When someone else suddenly interposes himself between Scorpius and O'Neill. It's Col. Jack Crichton (in a black suit and tie—for someone who was Earth's top "MiB" for a while, he certainly manages to look the part now). Scorpius freezes, a mix of surprise and recognition painted on his face. "You are John Crichton's father," he says.

"And you're Scorpius," says Jack. There is cold fury in his voice, barely restrained. John has never spoken to his father of his history with Scorpius; Jack has none of the details of the cycles-long torture and pursuit and sundry atrocities. He only knows that in the scant few hours since his son came back into his life, whenever he mentions Scorpius, his voice gets harder and his eyes show the fear. "I hear that you and my son have some history between you."

Scorpius takes a microt to consider his options and deems that the most advantageous tone to strike in this moment is conciliatory. "As you say—history. In the past, and a valued source of lessons learned. When your son first arrived in my region of the galaxy—an eventuality that none could have predicted—I mistook him for an enemy, and so made him my enemy. I count this the gravest error I have ever made." Jack is startled into silence by Scorpius's frank admission and suave manner—the way John described him, Jack was expecting some type of drooling monster, barely articulate and yet still frightening enough to make Darth Vader wet his Sith-Lord skivvies—and this pause allows Scorpius to get the last word. "Despite my best efforts, John Crichton persevered, even thrived, in hostile and unfamiliar territory—a trait cleared shared by the rest of his species," as Scorpius says this, he glances about the room, noting its alien angles and crystalline décor. Then he pushes his way past Jack Crichton and makes for Jack O'Neill. "Excuse me."

The elder Crichton lets him go, wondering what in the hell to make of all that.

Scorpius now stands before General O'Neill. He does not know this Human's name, but he recognizes authority when he sees it. "You are the Human leader," he pronounces.

"Lieutenant General Jack O'Neill. Two l's." He doesn't offer his hand; he doesn't bother to correct Scorpius's assumption. (At any rate, O'Neill doesn't think that Scorpius is wholly wrong: as far as he's concerned, he  _is_  the one in charge here.) He just waits for the leather-clad freak-show with the bad choppers to make his point.

"Your race has advanced considerably in the short time since Crichton's departure from this world," he begins.

Jack grins indulgently. "We're good at that. When we have to be."

"—And," continues Scorpius, hardly missing a beat, "it would appear that you have done so by mastering wormhole travel."

"Stop it, you're making me blush."

"But you did  _not_  acquire this knowledge from John Crichton," says Scorpius, who starts to pace at this point, like a Holmesian detective ready to spring the conclusion of his brilliant deductions. "He knows its peril, guards it too closely. And you could not have come by it on your own."

"Couldn't we?" says O'Neill. "Crichton opened  _his_  first wormhole all on his own."

Scorpius stops, looks about the grand chamber, with all its Human military personnel and suited dignitaries and alien ambassadors, and then eyeballs O'Neill. "To  _master_  this technology so quickly suggests alien influence. The Ancients, perhaps? Did they come here after all, desperate for a new home, even after their probe of Crichton's memories led them to deem Earth unsuitable and Humans unworthy? Trading knowledge for asylum?"

"Oh… you," says O'Neill, shaking a finger at Scorpius. "You musta figured it all out, right? It's the city, isn't it? The Ancients built this place, ya know." O'Neill, of course, has already been fully briefed, and he knows that Crichton's Ancients are Furlings, not Alterans, but there's no reason to clue Scorpius in on that tidbit. He takes a sip of punch from a plastic cup and rocks back on his heels. "Right here on Earth. Thirty million years ago, or so the eggheads tell me."

Scorpius is momentarily stunned into silence. Can it be—once again, these baffling Humans have led him to miscalculate so  _completely_? Moreover, if this is true, if the Humans and the Ancients have been so closely intertwined for longer than galactic civilization has existed, how could Crichton have been unaware of the fact? Something does not add up; Scorpius is missing some vital piece of the puzzle, and if he can only glean a bit more from this pompous, irreverent general—

Scorpius's internal deliberations are interrupted when a handheld communications device rings, and General O'Neill withdraws it from his pocket and answers it. "O'Neill. … Did they, now? … Allrighty then." He puts the device back in his pocket, whistles to get the attention of everyone in the room, and shouts, "All right, folks, that's it! Party's over! Sweep 'em and keep 'em!"

Momentary chaos siezes the room as the white light of an Asgard transporter beam sweeps across the room, scooping up Scorpius, and Lt. Gallara, and also Aeryn Sun—much to the wrath and horror of both John and Jack Crichton. "What did you  _do_!?" bellows Crichton, who lunges at O'Neill—his father and Teal'c hold him back, but he is not to be silenced. "WHERE'S AERYN!?"

The only Peacekeeper left in the room is the Kalish, Sub-Officer Nalu, at least until the Interion, Officer Loornag, rushes in. Nalu's confusion and distress are matched only by Loornag's ire: "What have you done with my soldiers?" he cries—for, of course, the four Sebacean commandos that he had with him out in the corridor only a moment ago have now disappeared.

O'Neill, meanwhile, tries to placate Crichton with a forceful hand on his shoulder. "Relax, Commander. We've just beamed every Sebacean in the city into the brig. They're fine. We'll let your wife out first thing."

"It couldn't be helped," adds Carter, who comes up from behind Teal'c. She touches the Jaffa's arm, a signal for Teal'c to let Crichton go; he does so. Then she explains, "If we wanted our security measures to be foolproof, we had to set the DNA scanners to screen for species only, not individuals. It was the only way to be sure."

Crichton glowers at her. "What happened?"

"It seems that your boy Scorpius ordered the launch of some kind of troop-transport and tried to sneak on board the  _Odyssey_ ," says O'Neill. "Pulled some fancy flying, but they couldn't fool Asgard sensors."

"Well," mutters Crichton humorlessly, "guess a stealth trajectory can only fly you so far these days."

"C'mon," says O'Neill, in as friendly a tone as he can muster. "Let's go spring Mrs. Crichton and see if we've picked up any uninvited—"

It's at this point that Mitchell and Jackson finally get O'Neill's attention. "Um… General?" says Mitchell. He has one hand raised, trying to flag down O'Neill, and the other holds a plate positively laden with a heaping pile of  _hors d'œuvres_ , which had only just been fobbed off onto him by Vala Mal Doran moments ago. Next to him, Daniel Jackson stands, shell-shocked and perplexed, holding two such plates; and a fourth lies spilled at their feet, still spinning to an eventual clattering halt on the floor.

Because just now, Vala has disappeared as well.


	4. Chapter 4

Up in space, a few short minutes ago, the crewmen of the  _Odyssey_  had performed their jobs admirably, beaming the six-man crew of the Peacekeeper Marauder out of that ship and into their brig, and then shredding the Marauder's engines with a few well-placed rail-gun rounds. Now the disabled wreck of the Marauder drifts in low orbit, nothing more than space-junk, at least until the Human scientists can scoop it up and get a better look at it.

Down on Atlantis, O'Neill and the others are a little surprised and a little relieved to find nobody new in the brig. There's Scorpius, who already sits on the cot, eyes closed and cross-legged, thinking hard; the four commandos, disarmed (their pulse-rifles weren't beamed in with them), standing about, murmuring, confused; and Aeryn and Vala, each staring the other down, as if to say, "Oh, this just  _must_  be all  _your_  fault."

O'Neill waves a hand in front of the sensor that drops the force-field (he has the ATA gene, it responds to him when it won't for so many others). Crichton darts into the cell, pulls Aeryn into a hug, and leads her back out into the corridor. Vala follows and swats O'Neill on the arm as she walks by. "Your aim is  _tel'kek_!" The precise meaning of the Goa'uld curse-word is lost on O'Neill, but he gets the drift.

O'Neill takes his hat off, puts it under his arm, and extends a hand to Aeryn. "On behalf of the United States government and the people of Earth, my sincerest apologies. The beam wasn't meant for you."

Aeryn, who has spent cycles playing diplomat since the end of the War, takes his hand and says, "I understand. A warning would have been nice, though."

"To be honest," says Carter, "we didn't actually think he'd try and pull anything."

Now Scorpius's eyes snap open, and he rises to his feet. The force-field is still down, but Scorpius makes no move for the exit. "'Pull' what?" he inquires. "What am I accused of?"

"Don't play dumb, Grasshopper," growls Crichton. "You sent a Marauder full of commandos to try and take the  _Odyssey_  by force? Can't believe you'd be that stu—"

Scorpius cuts him off. "I ordered no such action." Before either Crichton or Aeryn can express their obvious disbelief, he continues, " _but_ , I did establish communications through the wormhole with the Peacekeeper High Council, including Grand Chancellor  _Grayza_." He spits her name with all the scorn that she has earned in his eyes, still palpable even after all these cycles.

Crichton freezes, stares at Scorpius, looks him in the eye— _bores_  into him with his eyes. Aeryn's face is contorted with thought—she isn't trying to read Scorpy like John is, she's following his logic in her head. Either way, they both come to the same conclusion.

"Scorpy didn't do it," pronounces Crichton.

"It would take more mivonks than brains," agrees Aeryn. "Only Grayza would be so bold."

"And this Grayza person is…?" prompts O'Neill.

"Adolf Titler," says Crichton, running his mouth before his brain can catch up. O'Neill and Carter gape at him, wide-eyed, and Crichton adds, "Sorry—Aeryn can explain Peacekeeper politics better than me."

And so she does—she explains that since the end of the Peacekeeper–Scarran War, three distinct factions emerged among the Peacekeeper leadership, led by Grand Chancellor Mele-On Grayza, Admiral Tav Josbek (a crusty one-eyed bastard, but honorable when it came down to it), and Scorpius. Grayza's faction favored the old ways: rule the galaxy at the point of a pulse-rifle, and continue the longstanding policy of Sebacean purity. Scorpius was more interested in creating strength through whatever practical means were available: weapons research, espionage, strategic alliances, allowing aliens into the Peacekeepers; but he too was inclined to keep the Peacekeepers a military dictatorship. Scorpius's faction had gained some considerable influence during the Nebari War, but it largely fell out of favor again with the admiralty after the Kkore invasion. And then there was Admiral Josbek, who had thrown his lot in with the Eidelon priests: he intended to move the Peacekeepers back into their original role as defenders and, well, keepers of the peace; which was why he founded the Diplomatic Corps and recommissioned Aeryn Sun, first as a Captain, then as a Commandant, to run it. He wanted the Peacekeepers to be the glue that held together a thriving alliance of free worlds. In the last few cycles, though, the followers of Admiral Josbek's faction had become increasingly obsessed with ancient Peacekeeper and Eidelon history, and many of them were now zealous practitioners of an early Sebacean religion, Yemahlism, which was downright pacifistic—and thus unlikely to win many converts among the Peacekeeper top brass.

The upshot being, Grayza is still presently the head honcho in charge of the Peacekeepers, at least nominally. How stable or precarious her position really is is still anybody's guess. And Crichton chimes in at this point to mention Skreeths and the torture and killing of his best friend D.K. Knox and D.K.'s wife Laura, and the tearing up of his dad's house on Christmas Eve of '03, and how Grayza had been behind that fiasco too.

"Sounds like a real piece of work," says Carter after hearing all that. She frowns, looks to O'Neill, and asks, "What do we do now?"

"Well the talks are off," says O'Neill, "nixing" the air with both arms. "No deals, no nothing." He closes up the force-field again and tells Crichton and Aeryn, while pointing at Scorpius, "And  _he_ stays right here until I decide it's time to kick him off the planet!"

"Fine by me," says Crichton.

"Wait," says Scorpius. "Before you leave me here, there's something you should see."

Aeryn rests a hand on John's arm to stop him from leaving. Scorpius, meanwhile, reaches two fingers up to his cooling-rod carriage and touches the blinking buttons there. Crichton and Aeryn have seen this before, it's no surprise to them, but the grotesquery of watching the cooling-rods emerge from within Scorpius's brain puts Carter and O'Neill both on their heels, and Vala looks quite ready to lose her  _hors d'œuvres_.

Scorpius reaches up into the carriage—three of the rods glow with a soft blue, but one is black. In fact, it's not even a cooling-rod at all, but a Peacekeeper data-chip. "Crichton," he grunts, breathing heavily. "Take—"

Crichton nods to O'Neill, who opens the force-wall again. Crichton and Aeryn go into the cell; Scorpius removes the chip and presses it into Crichton's hands, and Aeryn closes the rod-carriage again. The four commandos in the back of the cell watch all of this with discipline and aplomb, but even through the black-visored helmets, Aeryn can tell that Scorpius's own men are unsettled by what they've just seen.

* * *

"Peacekeeper data-crystal," says Aeryn. "High volume storage, heavily encrypted." She sits in the briefing-room overlooking Atlantis's Stargate along with John, Samantha Carter, and two newcomers, Rodney McKay and Radek Zelenka.

Radek holds out his hand, the universal "May I?" gesture, and Aeryn passes him the chip. He pushes his glasses up his nose and looks at the object closely. "Just how much data can one of these crystals hold?"

Aeryn has no point of reference for conversion, but Crichton shrugs and says, "Best guess? Hundreds of exabytes, maybe up to a zettabyte."

"So about on par with Goa'uld data crystals then," says McKay. "I guess your people aren't  _totally_  primitive then."

Aeryn glares. "The last time I was on Earth, your scientists blew up their computers from ten motras away just by test-firing my pulse-pistol."

"Well, yeah! All the best and brightest were working at the SGC or Area 51," snorts McKay. "Bunch of second-stringers, should've known to shield for plasma-discharge EMP…"

Crichton clears his throat and says, "Excuse me. Can we—read that thing, without a PK-issue interface? We don't want anyone on Scorpy's ship to find out—"

"I'm sure we can rig something up," says Zelenka. He turns to Carter and asks, "We really should bring Felger in on this, he's the best at—"

"Not going to happen," says Carter. "Know why?"

McKay puts up a finger and offers, "Because Jay is even more obnoxious to you than I used to be?"

"No," snaps Carter. "Because the Crichton-Knox Wormhole is open again,  _you two_  are the ones most directly responsible for re-opening it, and so you get to deal with the fallout!"

"Jeez," mutters McKay. "Save the planet from the Wraith, and this is the thanks we—give me that!" He snatches the chip out of Zelenka's hands, and the two scientists, Canadian and Czech, rise to deliver the chip to their laboratory and get to work.

Once they've gone, Carter nods to herself, mildly embarrassed; then she looks up at Aeryn and says, "It shouldn't take them very long. An hour, two tops."

"I wonder what Scorpius is so desperate for us to see," murmurs Aeryn to herself.

Just then, the door to the briefing-room hisses open, and Daniel Jackson skids to a halt within the doorway. He leans part-way into the room and asks, "Sam, have you seen Vala?"

"Yeah, she said she was feeling sick and wanted to head to the infirmary. I think Dr. Lam just beamed over from the SGC a little while ago."

"All right, well—thanks," says Daniel. He gives a friendly nod-and-wave to Aeryn and Crichton and says, "Exciting day, huh?" Then he dashes off again.

* * *

About an hour later, the original SG-1—O'Neill, Carter, Jackson, and Teal'c—are gathered in the briefing room, plus Mitchell, Jack Crichton, John Crichton, and Aeryn Sun. Aeryn pours over a Human-built laptop computer, with the PK data-chip attached to it via an adapter built a short while ago by McKay and Zelenka. Jackson peeks over Aeryn's shoulder, eager to get a look at more written Sebacean. "What did you say this dialect was called?" he asks.

"Jaal Sebacean," answers Aeryn offhandedly. "It's the standard in Peacekeepers. Most colony worlds have their own languages." She scrolls through the data, page after page of log-entries… shipboard, Gammak base… "Frell me sideways," she breathes.

"What is it?" asks Crichton.

"I think we're looking at a copy of Scorpius's personal logs." She very quickly scrolls to the end of the file, to the most recent few entries. "Here we are—Scorpius's mission through the wormhole. He was curious about Humans re-opening the wormhole and wanted to come through and assess Earth's potential threat-level." She looks up at O'Neill and raises her eyebrows. "Stop you if possible, before you build a wormhole weapon and destroy the entire galaxy."

"For cryin' out loud, we're not even  _trying_  to do that!" says O'Neill. Then an awkward pause, and he turns to Carter and asks, "Are we?"

She shrugs. "We can already use Stargates to blow up suns. Can't imagine we'd ever need a bigger boom than that."

"Whoa, whoa, hold on," says Crichton, throwing up his hands. "To do that, you've have to remove so much mass from a star so quickly, it would mean connecting a 'gate to, like, a black hole and—"

Carter quirks an eyebrow at him, a fine impression of Teal'c if ever there was one—and upon seeing this, Teal'c follows suit and raises his own famed eyebrow at Crichton.

"Holy frell," whispers Crichton, falling back into his chair and pondering the possibilities.

"Maybe Scorpius was right to worry," says Aeryn with a grimace. Then she looks back down at the computer and reads the rest of the file. "It says here that Scorpius enticed the other factions in High Command with ulterior missions he promised to carry out if they would support his request to come to Earth. Grayza wanted—" Aeryn pauses, squints, reads it again. "—a variety of Human DNA samples, from all over the planet. As diverse as Scorpius could manage without being detected."

"Does it say why she wanted them?" asks O'Neill.

Aeryn shakes her head. "No. You'll have to ask Scorpius; but it's entirely possible Grayza wasn't willing to confide in him. As for Admiral Josbek… it says something about the recovery of an Eidelon artifact, left here twenty-seven-thousand cycles ago."

That gets Dr. Jackson's attention. "Finding alien artifacts is sort of our specialty." He points at a line of Sebacean text on the screen and asks, "Does this say—'three keys'?"

"A better translation would be 'three probes'," says Aeryn.

John practically falls out of his chair. "Three probes? Three more of those frelling probes, on Earth!?"

Once everyone manages to get Crichton calmed back down again, he quickly recounts a version of his adventures on the planet Arnessk—everything he can recall, Jool and the Interions, the child's tile, Grandma blowing powder in everybody's face, the three probes sent by "enemies of peace" (whoever the frell they were), the Darnaz Triangle, the Eidelon priests, the magnetic summers, the goat—all of it. Well, he doesn't mention Lakah bugs or Grayza or Heppel oil or "taking one for the team", but most of it.

"Point is, the probes made the whole friggin' temple disappear, like it was out of phase with our dimension or something," finishes Crichton. "You guys got anything that can help us search for  _that_?"

Carter and Jackson look at each other, and Teal'c nods and offers a simple reply: "Reetou detectors."

"How long would it take to rig up a big, honkin'  _space_  Reetou detector?" asks O'Neill.

Carter shrugs. "Give me fifteen minutes to reconfigure the Asgard sensors aboard the  _Odyssey_ , and we won't even need to."

"You have a go," says O'Neill. Then he grins and adds, "I love getting to say that."

Carter immediately comms the  _Odyssey_  and disappears in a flash of light.

O'Neill then stands up and says, "All right, let's go talk to 'Scorpy' again. Crichtons, come with me."

* * *

O'Neill's order is interpreted as a broad invitation—Aeryn, John, Jack, and Cam all fall into lockstep behind the general, and they make their way back to the brig. Scorpius is still there, along with the four commandos, and now Sub-Officer Nalu and Officer Loornag.

O'Neill doesn't mince words. "What does Grayza want with Human DNA?"

"I do not know," says Scorpius.

"But you had every intention of fulfilling her request," accuses Aeryn.

"If it proved feasible," he admits.

"Come on, man," says Crichton, leaning on the wall by the cell-door. "Level with us here. Play ball. You're the master of the Xanatos gambit, always playing ten steps ahead—so speculate. What do you  _think_  Grayza wants?"

Scorpius regards Crichton for several microts, then says, "I will provide you with my best hypothesis—on the condition of diplomatic immunity, and safe passage for myself and my men back through the wormhole as soon as possible."

Crichton turns to O'Neill and laughs through his teeth, a forced and mirthless hiss. "What'd I tell ya? Guy's always got an angle—"

O'Neill interrupts him. "Sure. You talk, and if we like what you have to say, you can go home."

"I believe that Grayza wants to procure Human DNA to use as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Breakaway Colonies."

At once, Aeryn and Crichton understand. The Sebacean Breakaway Colonies were founded by a small group of Peacekeeper defectors, a mere 1,900 cycles ago—a genetic bottleneck that left the colonists extremely vulnerable to inherited disease and justifiably cautious of accidental inbreeding. And Aeryn and Crichton know all too well—the proof is in their five-cycle-old daughter, really the daughter of John and Princess Katralla, Katy Crichton, born shortly after the Nebari attacked the Royal Planet—that Human DNA is much more compatible with that of the colonists than Peacekeeper DNA.

Crichton does what he can to explain this to O'Neill, without mentioning how he almost became a prince-consort or had to wear pink on his first wedding day. He doesn't want to talk about that with his father and cousin in the room. And he knows that Aeryn doesn't really like to be reminded that Katy isn't her biological daughter—not that she loves Katy any less than Zhaan or Deke, of course not, she's been a mom to all three kids and loved them all the same, even raising Katy and Zhaan as twins, and woe betide anyone who suggests that they aren't—but she  _despises_  the fact that Empress Novia and Princess Katralla took the  _choice_  away from John. That, she doesn't care to be reminded of.

The universe has done quite enough to John Crichton. But three beautiful, precocious, disorderly children are quite enough to make up for it in Aeryn's view.

At the end of it, O'Neill sighs. "All right, fine." He asks Scorpius, "These DNA samples, they could help people?"

"Billions of Sebaceans, spread across dozens of systems, could be spared the risk of fatal or debilitating genetic disease."

"But this Grayza person would want something in return."

"Closer ties between the Breakaway Colonies and the Peacekeepers, without doubt," says Scorpius. "A small but significant tilt in the balance of galactic power."

"But, if, say,  _we_  were to show up and give them away…" O'Neill trails off and lets Scorpius finish the thought for him.

"Then you would reap any diplomatic benefits in Grayza's stead, and the potential suffering of millions would still be averted."

O'Neill nods. "Glad we're finally seeing eye-to-eye." He waves his hand across the sensor on the wall, dropping the force-field. "Now get off my planet."

* * *

A short while later, after Scorpius and the rest of the Peacekeepers have been escorted back to their Marauder, and O'Neill and the family Crichton have all watched the Marauder lift off and pass through the cloaking-shield, Jack Crichton turns to O'Neill and asks, "You planning a mission out to the Uncharted Territories? 'Cuz I still haven't been out on a  _Daedalus_ -class yet."

"Not right away," says O'Neill, "but it's getting to the point where we can't just ignore that corner of the galaxy anymore. Hey, Mitchell?"

"Yeah?"

"What do you say? Want to escort your uncle on a diplomatic mission to the far side of the galaxy sometime?"

"He does still need to meet his grandkids," Aeryn points out.

Jack Crichton looks at Jack O'Neill with pleading puppy-dog eyes.

And up in space, the  _Conquistador_  pauses just long enough to receive six more commandos, beamed directly from the  _Odyssey's_  brig into its own—where they will doubtless face the wrath of Scorpius, for having dared to assist Grayza in her efforts to undermine him—before it activates its Phase Stabilizer and disappears into the open wormhole, charting a sure path on the return voyage by following the comm-link previously established with Peacekeeper High Command.

The very instant that Scorpius's vessel disappears into the wild blue maw, down on Atlantis, Crichton can  _feel_  it—and he sincerely hopes that Scorpy frells something up and gets his rat-bastard face turned to goo.

* * *

It's past midnight when everyone makes their way back inside the main spire of Atlantis. By now, they're all exhausted, and John and Aeryn want nothing more than a bedroom to collapse into together. Atlantis has plenty of those, and Jackson has taken it upon himself to see that they've been assigned quarters and to escort them there. But just when he catches up with them, a voice comes over the city intercom: "Vala Mal Doran and Aeryn Sun to the infirmary, please. Vala Mal Doran and Aeryn Sun to the infirmary."

Aeryn looks up at the ceiling. "Frelling—what now!?"

* * *

Jackson leads the way. John and Aeryn follow with trepidation.

The Atlantean infirmary is bright, alien, and hodgepodge—filled with Earth computers and medical equipment, to compliment the Ancient devices that they haven't quite mastered yet. Dr. Carolyn Lam stands in the middle of the room, a manila folder in hand, while Vala sits upright on the examination table, looking impatient to the point of irritation.

"Hey guys," says Jackson. "What's going on?"

Carolyn glances back at Vala, who (never shy) exclaims, "I wanted to know why in the name of  _Adria_  that beam picked  _me_  up with the Peacekeepers!"

Jackson stares blankly at Vala for several seconds. "Did you just take your own daughter's name in vain?"

"Well she was the sole surviving goddess of an entire galaxy for—you know what? That's not important right now!" She waves a hand at Dr. Lam and asks, "What did you find? And why are  _they_  here?"

"Well," says Carolyn, opening the file, "I don't know quite how to tell you this—and honestly, Sebacean DNA is so similar to human that I wouldn't have even noticed if I didn't know what to look for—but, Vala, you're at least half Sebacean."

"How is that possible?" asks Aeryn.

"It isn't!" retorts Vala. "You…  _people_  come from a galactic backwater so far away, you don't even have Stargates!"

"Whoa, whoa, hold the phone just one microt here," says Crichton. "Are you saying that Vala here is half-Sebacean, half-human? Like—like mine and Aeryn's kids?"

Now Dr. Lam becomes very quiet and gives a little shake of her head. "No—I mean, yes, Vala  _is_  half-human and half-Sebacean, but it's more than that." She pulls two pages out of the file—the results of a very thorough genetic comparison—and gives them to Aeryn.

Aeryn stares down at the human script on the pages. It's all meaningless gobbledygook to her. "What am I looking at?"

"Um… well, your DNA and Vala's are  _so_  similar that—there's no mistaking it—Vala's Sebacean parent, whoever that was, was also one of  _your_  parents. The two of you are half-sisters."

Crichton looks as if he's about to faint. "Un-be-frelling-lievable…" he mutters under his breath.

"I'm related—to  _this_  tralk?" says Aeryn coldly.

Vala scrunches up her face and gapes at Crichton. "I've been having naughty thoughts about my brother-in-law!?" Then she gasps. "Cameron is my cousin-in-law!"

Carolyn, nervous to be standing at the center of hostility and attention, gives a toothy grin and says, "But, hey, long-lost sisters, right? Whoever could've guessed?"

Daniel raises his hand. "I could have. Just by looking at them, I mean."

Aeryn and Vala both glare and shout, "Shut up, Daniel!"

"—And also  _that_ ," grumbles Daniel.

Suddenly, Crichton exclaims, "Talyn!" Aeryn and Vala both look at him funny, and John explains, "Well it can't be Xhalax, right? Mommy-dearest never left the U.T.s, as far as we know. But we never did track down your dad!"

"Talyn Lyczac is dead," says Aeryn. "Xhalax killed him—it's how she became an assassin, you know this!"

"Ooh, Xhalax sounds like a badass!" says Vala. She jumps up from the exam table and throws her arms around Aeryn in an awkward hug. "Can we just say that we have the same mum? My stepmother was a terrible human being—"

Aeryn carefully pries Vala off of herself and pushes her away. "My mother was not a 'human' being at all, that's what makes us only half-siblings! And anyway, she's dead—shot by Crais, right before  _he_  died too!" Holding Vala by the wrists, Aeryn pushes her back across the room until Vala is once again sitting on the examination table. Then Aeryn, her voice thickening with emotion, backs away. "All of my ties to my upbringing in the Peacekeepers, any 'family' I had before Crichton, is stripped away from me, dead and buried. I'd like it to stay that way if—if it's not too much trouble." She spins on her heel—a tear never falls, not one; and she imagines that not even John will notice the lump caught in her throat—and marches out of the infirmary.

Crichton moves to go after her, but he is stopped briefly when Jackson coughs. "Ahem—um, Vala's father—"

"Daniel, please don't—" Vala starts. She  _really_  doesn't want him to say it—

"Vala's father is alive. We've met him. He's even visited Earth before."

Vala glares, but Daniel just shrugs. "What?" he says. "They have a right to know."

Vala crosses her arms and kicks her heels against the exam table. "And when Jacek doesn't turn out to be the father that Aeryn is expecting? Or—" now her own voice catches, "—or it turns out that he isn't—isn't even really  _my_ —?" The tears flow freely from Vala Mal Doran, and Daniel (with a long-suffering roll of his eyes) trudges across the room to comfort her.

"Hey Jackson," says Crichton on his way out the door. Vala has already buried her head in the crook of Daniel's neck; Daniel peeks past her messy pigtails and meets Crichton's gaze. "Thanks," says John. Daniel answers with an understanding nod, and Crichton darts off after Aeryn.

* * *

The next morning sees Vala and Mitchell back at the SGC, bright and early. They walk into the briefing room together, where General Landry is already drinking coffee and glancing over a few mission reports. The general's reading-glasses hang low on his nose, and he doesn't even glance up from the reports. "I can tell that you want something. Probably something I'll have to say 'no' to. Let's have it."

"I need to find my father," says Vala after a tense moment.

Landry looks up. "Family emergency?"

"Something like that," says Vala. "Um—well—Aeryn Sun is my sister. Just found out." She grins wide, a smile that usually melts men the general's age.

"You know that SG-1 is scheduled to go on a mission in two days' time—"

"It won't take that long, I promise!" exclaims Vala, leaning over the table. "Give me six hours, and if I haven't found Jacek by then, I'll come right back home like a good girl—please, please, please, please, please, please—"

"She's just gonna keep saying 'please' until you let her go," offers Mitchell. Vala clams up, points at Mitchell, and nods in agreement.

Landry sighs, takes off his spectacles, and pinches the bridge of his nose. "You have  _five_  hours. Gear up, you can head out after SG-19 gets back from P2M-383."

"Thank you!" Vala blurts with a little jump into the air.

"Oh, and Vala?" The general's warning stops her before she can dash out of the room. "Don't make me regret this."

Vala gives an awkward salute and backs her way out, slow and fumbling. "No, of course not, Sir! I'll just—be—thank you—!" As she departs, Mitchell grins, shakes his head, and puts his hands in his pockets.

"Colonel Mitchell," pronounces Landry, once the two men are alone—the general in charge of the SGC, and the colonel who heads up its flagship team—and his voice is an odd mix of business and menace. "Since you're here, why don't you finish going over these reports? Oh, and Colonel: go ahead and handle the debrief of Major Hailey's team when they get back too."

Landry gets up, takes his coffee, and retreats to his office; and Mitchell, crestfallen, takes his place at the conference table and starts going over the paperwork.

* * *

Less than thirty minutes later, the announcement comes from Sgt. Harriman over the base intercom—offworld activation, incoming wormhole, SG-19 returning as scheduled. No alarms, no klaxons, no flashing red emergency-lights—nothing out of the ordinary.

Grateful for the reprieve, Mitchell gets up, moves past the control-room (with a friendly wave to Walter), and then heads down into the gate-room, where the iris is just now twisting open. The rippling blue event-horizon appears, and the first member of SG-19 steps through the gate—a petite, fierce-looking redhead with pouting lips and a steely gaze, Major Jennifer Hailey. As smart as Carter in the astrophysics department, Mitchell recalls, but a little on the reckless side. Still, she was fast becoming one of the SGC's most experienced officers. "Major. How're things on 383?"

Hailey does a poor job concealing her boredom. "It was a milk-run. Checkup on some iron-age villagers. Nothing to report."

Right behind Hailey, two more of her team emerge from the 'gate—Lieutenants Gale and Philips. These two are a downright mysterious pair, not terribly social except with each other and the rest of SG-19. Lt. John Gale is a serious kid, can't be more than twenty, with a buzz-cut and haunted eyes. Kid always looks like he has the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders. Mitchell is fond of the guy, in a paternalistic sort of way, and wants to tell him to lighten up—how many kids his age get to visit other planets for a living?—but somehow, he knows that nothing he says will make Gale take his posting to an SG team as anything less than life or death, fate of the planet.

And as for young Lt. Cameron Philips (Mitchell was disappointed when he first heard that; he'd never thought of 'Cameron' has anything other than a boy's name), she's even more of an enigma. Smaller and slighter than Hailey, she has a perpetually grave expression and the lithe figure of a ballerina, but the word around the base is, nobody—not even the self-defense instructors—has ever thrown her onto the mat. As she walks past, sweeping the gate-room with her gaze—she's always wary of her surroundings in a way that makes Mitchell think of post-traumatic stress—he briefly wonders whether those big brown doe-eyes aren't the reason nobody's ever bested her in a sparring match. Surely Teal'c wouldn't fall for that—it might be interesting to set that fight up sometime.

Finally, the eldest member of SG-19 materializes in the gate-room, and the iris closes behind him. The team geek, Dr. John Henry, a bear of a man with a childlike outlook on life and a gentlemanly hint of a deep southern accent, plods down the ramp behind Philips. Mitchell knows all too well, the man is like a damned walking encyclopedia—SG-19's archaeologist on paper, but if you get him going about physics or medicine or economics or computers—or, heaven forbid, pop-culture—he'll talk your ear off for an hour solid. And don't even mention chess, or God help you, you'll lose an afternoon.

"Lieutenants," says Mitchell with a nod. "Doc."

Dr. Henry takes it as an invitation. "P2M-383 is home to a most fascinating culture!" he says exuberantly. "The indigenous people are almost certainly related to the La Tène of the later hundreds B.C.E., only they've innovated a most ingenious—"

Mitchell holds up a hand. "Later, Doc. Any signs of Ori activity?"

"None whatsoever," says Gale. "It doesn't look like a Prior ever visited them."

"Even the Goa'uld structures—and there weren't many of those—were long-abandoned," adds Hailey. "Three-thousand years at least."

"Three-thousand two-hundred and five years," says Philips. Gale glares at her, visibly annoyed, and she amends, "If I had to take a guess."

"I concur," says Dr. Henry with a broad grin.

Mitchell is momentarily baffled and says, "You… don't really have to be that exact."

Philips nods. "Thank you for explaining."

"Right…" Mitchell claps his hands together and says, "Look, why don't you all get cleaned up, have Dr. Lam give you a once-over, and then we can have the debriefing in the conference room at 0800, capisce?"

"Thanks, Colonel," says Gale, who takes Philips by the arm and leads her insistently away from the ramp. Hailey is already out in the corridor, ignoring the lot of them, but Dr. Henry remains standing in the gate-room. "I still haven't gotten to tell you about the 383 natives' method for stream-fishing—"

"Save it for the report, Doc," says Mitchell, waiving him away. "I'm sure it'll make for a riveting read." Once Dr. Henry has left, Mitchell stands alone in the gate-room for a moment, staring after them. They're a weird bunch; but, hey, at least they all have an incredibly bright future ahead of them, right?

He makes for the blast-door, only to run smack-dab into Vala, who now wears a revealing number consisting of thigh-high boots, a silver skirt, and a black leather bustier. No SGC fatigues for Vala where she's going: the Tau'ri uniform would make her stick out like a sore thumb, and that would complicate matters. She produces a scrap of paper (from her cleavage, naturally) bearing a penciled gate-address and hands it to Mitchell. "Be a dear, Cam, and give this to Walter, would you?"

"Yeah—sure," says Mitchell. He takes the paper (and tries his damnedest to keep his gaze above neck-level) and heads out into the corridor.

Vala scrunches her shoulders up and grins wide as she flounces past Cameron, spinning on one heel as she goes so that she's facing the doorway. "See you around," she calls after him, "cousin."

Mitchell freezes in the hallway. He doesn't turn around; he just winces and mutters under his breath, "Jesus, Mary & Joseph…" Then he heads toward the control-room.

And Vala waits near the foot of the ramp for Walter to dial her first destination, a planet where she can hopefully get word of Jacek's latest activities.


	5. Chapter 5

That same morning, up on the  _Odyssey_ , Carter sleeps—not in a bunk, but in the ship's dedicated astrophysics lab. She lies slumped over a table and partly over a computer keyboard, a line of drool running from her mouth—hardly the first time that she has worked herself obsessively, to the point of falling asleep on the job, in a lab just like this one. She has done so in this very lab many times before—the small room on the  _Odyssey_  is cozy and quiet and relatively solitary, and so Carter has practically made this place her own, for those times when she wants to tinker with a new project or try and figure out some inscrutable piece of tech derived from the Asgard core.

The computer beeps—a short, high-pitched little alarm to indicate that its work is done—and Carter instantly snaps awake.

It takes about a minute and a half for Samantha to get her bearings and realize where she is—what she'd been doing all last night. It was all so—well, okay, pretty much par for the course for a member of SG-1, but still, what a wild ride. John Crichton and Aeryn Sun come through the wormhole on a Peacekeeper cruiser? The Air Force throws together a little diplomatic shindig, they foil some shenanigans, and now they're on some kind of treasure-hunt?

Yeah, that was it: she had been modifying the Asgard sensors on the  _Odyssey_  to look for anything on Earth that was out of phase with this dimension. Then she'd set the scanners to sweep the planet thoroughly, and… must have dozed off while waiting for results.

She now rubs the sleep out of her eyes and peers at the computer screen. A map of the Earth—a Mollweide projection—shows on the display, along with a single bright blinking red light. Sam blinks herself and double-checks the coordinates. "Huh," she says aloud. "Ya don't say…"

* * *

Aeryn Sun has never become accustomed to sleeping in. It is the soldier's life, a part of her, ingrained and never truly set aside. Even after nearly eight cycles of marriage, she has not gotten used to the idea of a lazy morning in bed with her mate. She appreciates awakening in his arms, the feeling of her bare skin upon his, good-morning kisses, cuddling and other activities.

But she is ultimately an early riser, and it is John Crichton who has adapted his ways to her.

Once his eyes have opened, she looks into them earnestly and says, "I want to go home, John. I want to see our children."

John nods; he agrees. "Gotta close the wormhole first."

She knows; she understands. This isn't a social visit or a family vacation. That will have to wait for another time—but at least it's possible now. The Earth-ships can cross the galaxy in a matter of arns when they need to. So, by prioritizing her children, Aeryn Sun knows that she is not depriving John Crichton of anything. It's about family: it always is, now and in times to come.

Crichton is still pensive, though. "Are you sure you don't want to meet this Jacek guy first and get his version of the story? You might—"

Aeryn rolls away from John and slams her head back down onto the pillow. "Ugh—I don't know! I don't know what to make of any of this!" She props herself up on one elbow and says, "A man who might be my father, and a long-lost sister living here on Earth… I still think you frelled up in the wormhole!" Her smile says that she's teasing, but deep down, she wonders. Is it possible? Did some sub-conscious corner deep within John Crichton's brain lead them to an alternate Earth, one capable of defending itself from the Peacekeepers? But… no, nothing else has contradicted her memory of their last visit to Earth. Jack Crichton is the same, and the Human government being full of frelling liars keeping secrets from their own people doesn't surprise her in the least.

Crichton shrugs. "I'm just saying. If it were me, I'd want to know."

"Well,  _your_  father is a decent person." She leans in and plants a soft kiss on John's lips. "And you were right after all, about all this 'family' dren…"

"I was right about something? Hot dog, one for the record-books."

Aeryn, laughing, tosses the pillow into Crichton's face. "And your cousin turned out even better. A pilot  _and_  a soldier, just like your father was. What happened to  _you_ , I wonder?"

Crichton tosses the pillow back, adds his own to the pile, and grunts, "Oh, you're askin' for it now, woman!"

And some truly breathtaking recreation might have followed then, if not for the fact that Crichton's comms device chirped—indicating the reception of a signal from Carter, up on the  _Odyssey_.

* * *

By the time that Crichton and Aeryn beam up to the Earth-cruiser, Dr. Jackson is already there. He's waiting to greet them on the bridge with Samantha, looking just a bit more bleary-eyed than her—he's excited to find out what she's learned, of course he is, but the coffee hasn't quite kicked in yet.

Sam gets right down to business: "I thought you might want to see this, given what you said before about that 'Darnaz Triangle' thingy on Arnessk." Crichton watches curiously as she brings up an image on the main viewer, a grid-lined world-map. She taps a few keys on the laptop computer plugged in near the sensor-tech's station, and a blinking red dot appears on the map, in the Mid-Atlantic Ocean. "When I tweaked the sensors to pick up anything out-of-phase, this is what pinged."

"Huh," says Crichton.

"Holy crap," says Jackson.

"What?" says Aeryn. "What's so important about a spot in the middle of the ocean somewhere?"

Crichton says nothing, but he walks up to the view-screen and places his finger on it, just south of the dot, right near Puerto Rico. He begins to trace a triangle with his finger around the dot, keeping it in the center of the imaginary figure's imaginary sides, as he moves his hand from Puerto Rico—to Florida—to Bermuda.

* * *

"On Arnessk," explains Crichton, "the probes themselves weren't out of phase, they were just sort of hidden around the old city-ruins. Instructor Vella spent years looking for the first one."

"We don't have that kind of time," says Aeryn. She asks Carter, "Can't your advanced sensors just  _find_  them?"

"Maybe," says Carter. "What are they made of?"

Crichton shrugs. "Duranium?—naquadah?—nougat? I couldn't tell ya."

"Maybe let's just scan the points of the Triangle for metals not commonly found on Earth," suggests Daniel.

"Worth a try," says Carter. She sets the scanners, and seconds later, the screen lights up with three more dots, all equidistant from the big dot in the center of the triangle.

"Well how about that," says Crichton. He immediately dives into his best Shatner: "Can you… get a… transporter lock… Mr. Scott?"

Jackson shakes his head and slices the air with his hand: "No—no, we don't do that."

"Yeah," agrees Carter. "Just don't."

Crichton, defeated, looks pleadingly at Aeryn; but she only shrugs and then repeats the question for Carter: "Can we beam them up?"

"Working on it—" Carter types a few more quick keystrokes, and then sits back in satisfaction when three small, pointy, metallic alien artifacts appear on the deck-plating at Jackson's feet.

Daniel kneels down, picks up one of the Bermuda Probes, and turns it over in his hands. He holds it up to show Crichton. "No writing or any other markings that I can see. Do they look familiar?"

"Yeah, that's them all right," says Crichton. "Still no frelling clue where they came from, though."

Daniel agrees. These things don't look Ancient or Ori, and they predate the Goa'uld… "It's a mystery," he pronounces.

"So," begins Cater, "how do we deactivate the probes and find out whatever-it-is they're keeping hidden?"

"Well, you have to take each probe out to a distance of six-hundred motras apart—that's like meters or yards—"

"Just over half a klick?" asks Carter.

"Yeah," says Crichton. "Then, at the same time, whoever's holding each probe has to jam the big pointy bit… into the… ground…" Crichton's voice trails off, and he finds himself staring intently at the map on the viewscreen again.

"That—could be a problem," says Daniel.

Aeryn looks at the map, considering. "Do you have submersible vehicles?"

"I don't think we'll need submarines," says Carter. "We should be able to  _send_  the probes into the correct positions with the transporter too." In a flash, she's back on her computer and typing away. "It's just a matter of making sure that I get the distance to the ocean floor pinpoint-accurate, and I keep the probes oriented correctly relative to the z-axis during transport—there!" She presses the "enter" key one final time, and the three probes disappear in another flash of light.

Instantly, the rest of the  _Odyssey's_  sensors start going haywire.

"Uh, guys?" says Crichton, looking out at the Earth through one of the ship's viewing portals. "You want to come take a look at this?"

Aeryn, Daniel, and Sam crowd around the portal behind Crichton, where they all get a spectacular view of the Atlantic Ocean—and a shiny, pink-and-orange, triangle-shaped column of light, centered on the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, and rising to a height of hundreds of miles above the ocean's surface.

"Ooh-boy," mutters Daniel. Even as the light-beam fades away, he can't stop himself from staring after it. "Somebody definitely saw  _that_."

"Yeah," says Crichton, who also cannot peel his eyes away from the sight. "Forgot to mention that part. Sorry."

Samantha, similarly transfixed, says, "You know the worst part about having to come up with cover-up stories? The Q&A sessions with the press."

"Oh my God, the press," agrees Daniel.

While this is going on, the  _Odyssey's_  navigation console starts to beep with a quiet, steady rhythm. Aeryn pulls herself away from the portal and the three shell-shocked Humans, and she examines the console, trying to recall as much written English as she can. She taps a few keys, changing the map displayed on the main viewer—zooming it in from a planet-wide image to a narrowly-focused one, the very spot which had until just recently been the center of the Bermuda Triangle. The image on the screen is still computer-generated, wire-frame graphics rather than photo-realistic, but Aeryn nevertheless recognizes the shape that appears. "That looks familiar," she announces.

John, Daniel, and Samantha all turn around and stare at the viewscreen, where the image of a city—an Ancient city, six angular spokes jutting outward from a central, hexagonal hub—sits floating on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. It is not Atlantis, but it could be Atlantis's twin. A sister city-ship.

"Wow," says Crichton. "Looks like y'all got yourselves another one."

Jackson and Carter glance at each other; then they each scramble for the communicators, because they know that the people on the ground are either going to have a field day—or their asses (Jackson and Carter's to be specific) served up on a platter.

* * *

On direct orders from General O'Neill, the foursome beams down into the central spire tower of the newly-discovered Alteran city-ship. The first priority is to raise a cloaking-shield, if possible. Carter, Jackson, Crichton, and Sun appear in the control-room above the gate-room. Everything is dark and dead: no lights, no power. At once, Carter dashes over to the main computer and pries open a panel. She pulls out one of the transparent crystalline circuit-boards, attaches two leads from her laptop computer, and then reinserts the board. As her laptop boots, the computer console lights up. Then the rest of the lights within the control room come on… then the gate-room… and soon, there's power flowing everywhere.

"That was easy," comments Daniel.

"Well, unlike Atlantis, which sat underwater for ten-thousand years, straining its power-systems to keep the shield up,  _this_  city has been frozen out of time for who-only-knows how long?" says Carter.

"Uh… guys?" says Crichton. He's peering out the window, at the cityscape and the sky above it.

Aeryn looks over her husband's shoulder. "Those are some  _incredibly_  primitive vehicles."

She is answered by the roar of gasoline-engines: biplanes, monoplanes, all sorts of fixed-wing aircraft from down through the decades. There are ships out there too: steamships, sailing ships, even canoes. Most of the boats float placidly the in the ocean, a short distance from the edge of the city, but in all directions around it; some of them are actually aground, capsized on the city streets, with people crawling out of them—people in Western-style clothes from the early 20th century, the 18th, the 16th, and more than a few in Native American garb. Already, most of the planes are turning to land, aiming to use the city's streets as runways.

Crichton turns to Aeryn and asks, "Ever wanted to meet Amelia Earhart?"

"Actually, uh… she disappeared over the  _Pacific_  Ocean, so… she's probably not here…" says Jackson. He stares out the window at all of the planes and ships, a nigh-countless collection of lost vessels suddenly recovered, wondering to himself just how in the living hell the Air Force is going to explain this one.

Carter gapes, astounded. "It looks as if all of these people have just been…  _caught_  by the stasis-field erected by the probes. Centuries' worth of people, pulled out of time!" She immediately dashes over to the city-ship's computer, which is now fully active, and begins to examine its most recent data-files. "Okay, let's see… this city is definitely Ancient. They called it… Daniel?"

Daniel looks over her shoulder, at the Alteran text, and translates, "Parnassus. The city is called Parnassus. And if I'm reading this right, the last entry was made by a descended Ancient named," he pauses and quirks an eyebrow, "Ainus, who stopped here to check up on the city a little over eleven-thousand years ago and then 'went east into the middle-lands to live among the Children of Men'. Poetic."

"Twelve-thousand cycles ago is when the Eidelon temple disappeared from Arnessk," says Crichton.

"If the probes came from that side of the galaxy, it might've taken them a little longer to get here," guesses Carter. "But why even send probes to Earth?"

"Scorpius's logs mentioned an Eidelon artifact left behind on Earth," says Aeryn. "Perhaps this city is where the Eidelons left it."

"Yeah, that would make sense," says Daniel. "You said before that the Eidelons found Earth twenty-seven-thousand years ago, when they were looking for a primitive race to serve as their Peacekeepers—"

Aeryn nods. "They wanted an 'unknown species' that didn't have any standing conflicts with other races in the galaxy, a species that they could mold into becoming their 'trusted acolytes'."

"—and," Daniel concludes, "if they came here and found primitive humans living on all of the landmasses, but also this Ancient city, sitting in the middle of the ocean, mostly abandoned? They would've used it as their base."

"Here's a scary thought," says Carter. "The Goa'uld would have done the same thing, but the probes were already hiding it by the time Ra found Earth."

The room falls silent. The implications of that—the Goa'uld having been in possession of an Alteran city-ship for the last ten-thousand years—are terrifying indeed.

And that is when, down in the gate-room, the Stargate starts to spin up.

Like the 'gate on Atlantis, the inner ring doesn't actually move: it's a newer design of Stargate, with the symbols lighting up in turn in a pattern that resembles dialing. "Incoming wormhole?" says Crichton.

"Crap," says Jackson. "This 'gate must be overriding the one at the SGC now that it's active. Just like the Atlantis 'gate."

But with each new chevron lighting up on the Parnassus 'gate, the building they're standing in starts to shake, more and more violently. "I don't think that's what's happening!" shouts Carter over the din. She runs over to another computer console and asks, "Daniel! What is this number!?"

Daniel looks at the console—the 'gate is up to five chevrons now—and reads off, "It's exponential notation—one-point-two-six times ten to the eleventh! Why, what is this?"

"The number of seconds that the wormhole has been in transit!" says Carter. "Normally it takes between three and twenty seconds to travel between two Stargates, but this wormhole has been trying to connect with  _this_  specific gate for… over four-thousand years!"

"It was suspended in time by the probes," reasons Crichton. "Same as all those ships and people out there!"

The seventh chevron locks. Kawoosh!—the unstable vortex swirls out, and then settles back down into the event horizon of a wormhole.

"That's impossible," says Carter. "If someone dialed Earth four-thousand years ago, with Ra's 'gate buried in Egypt and this 'gate suspended out of phase, it should've just connected to the beta 'gate in Antarctica."

Now people are starting to flood out of the Stargate: a huge mass of people, in droves. They don't look like attackers; they look like refugees. They are men, women, and children, mostly dirty and disheveled, some wounded. Burn-marks and bloodstains mar their clothing, which consists of colorful embroidered robes for both the men and the women. And they are all shouting to each other, friends and family trying to cling together despite the press of the crowds, in a language that reminds Daniel of Babylonian, or perhaps Sumerian.

Instantly, Daniel becomes serious, and he finds that his compassion overrules his curiosity. "Sam? These people need our help. You'd better get in touch with General Landry; I'm going to go find out who they are."

The wormhole is still active—for all Sam knows, it might stay open for the full thirty-eight minutes—and still people are filling the gate-room. With the dozens soon apt to become hundreds, she agrees and puts a call out to the SGC.

Daniel, meanwhile, heads down to the gate-room, with Crichton and Aeryn on his flank—just in case.

* * *

They spend the rest of the day dealing with two separate but related refugee crises: the nearly five-hundred displaced people who have come through the Stargate, four-thousand years out of time; and the entire roster of every person and vessel ever having been lost in the Bermuda Triangle throughout all of history—a figure closer to fifteen-hundred souls.

They're all being kept on Atlantis for the time being, and a great deal of food and water and other supplies are being shipped in. The brass in the Air Force and the suits in Washington have no  _freaking clue_  just how they'll deal with this, not yet. But it may be that this is finally the big one, the thing they can't cover up or hide from the people of Earth. It might be the thing that forces them to disclose the existence of the Stargate to the people of Earth.

But that is for another day.

For now, Dr. Jackson is mostly interested in the offworld refugees. Their language is akin to Babylonian, close enough that he can talk to these people with relative ease. It is clear from what they tell him that their world—they call it Kobol—is, or rather was, under attack from the Goa'uld, and they were defenseless. Twelve tribes boarded great ships, arks, and set sail for a faraway star called Cyrannus; those left behind, the thirteenth tribe, would take the "High Road"—their word for the Stargate—and return to their ancestral world, to Earth.

The leader of the refugees—their tribal elder, his name is Enoch, he's a patriarch of sorts to these people, a bearded old man with long white hair and soulful brown eyes—is in possession of a device. It is a handheld means of dialing the Stargate, and it is obviously of Alteran construction. Daniel surmises that this device is somehow keyed specifically to the Parnassus 'gate and no other—which is, so far, his best and only explanation for what has happened.

Enoch and the other refugees react with disbelief, and then distress, when they learn that they have unwittingly traveled four-thousand years into the future. But when Daniel tells them that the Goa'uld have only recently been defeated, their empire brought low, the refugees are overjoyed. They throw up their hands and praise Almighty God and his prophet Sagan and their line of divinely-ordained kings, the Lords of Kobol, the last of whom (ninth of his line) remained on that doomed world to hold the line in battle with the terror from the heavens.

Once their prayers are finished, Enoch suggests that they might soon return to their planet, to Kobol, to learn of its fate. Perhaps they can even travel onward to the Cyrannus system, to find out what has happened to their brethren, the other Twelve Tribes of Mankind, in the intervening millennia.

It is a moment of optimism, and Daniel shares in their hope.

* * *

Crichton is the one who finds the Eidelon artifact. It doesn't look like anything special—just a little ceramic pyramid with symbols on each of the faces. Jackson is astonished to note that one of the symbols looks so much like the Eye of Ra, and yet it predates Ra coming to Earth by about seventeen millennia.

John informs him that the object, the "child's tile", has a symbol on each of the four faces to represent Eidelons, Sebaceans, Interions, and Humans, and that the symbol in all four cases means "peace". That's ironic to Daniel: the symbol that would eventually be co-opted by Ra, Earth's conqueror, originally stood for peace.

Carter takes a moment to scan the object, and she tells Crichton that there is some kind of technology within it. It isn't just some children's plaything, it's a device—but she can't begin to guess at what it is.

Crichton decides to keep it for now. After all, the Eidelon Priests are the ones who wanted it found. Maybe someday they can tell him what it's for and what it means. He's been wondering that, ever since he found the first one on Arnessk.

* * *

Before the day is out, Aeryn Sun receives a call that she has been half expecting, half dreading: Vala Mal Doran wants to her come directly to the SGC. Aeryn will go, but she will not allow herself to hope. When it comes to family that she has not built for herself, family which has not been earned through camaraderie and battle or the day-to-day travails of motherhood and marriage, hope has become forbidden.

On her last visit to Earth, some one-hundred monens ago, she would have taken her Prowler and arrived at her destination orders of magnitude faster than any Earth-vehicle the Humans were capable of building. Now the  _Odyssey's_  transporter beam sends her from Parnassus, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, in less than a microt. Defense measures within the facility under NORAD prevent any beaming directly down into the SCG, and so Aeryn must still suffer through the tedious elevator-ride, twenty-eight levels down. This does not help Commandant Sun's nerves, ordinarily steel but starting to fray just for the sake of this special occasion.

Both of the Air Force MPs who escort her during the elevator-ride ask for her autograph. The Human custom amuses her, and she obliges them, but it does not calm her spirits any.

The guards lead her into the conference room that overlooks the gateroom. General Hank Landry and Vala Mal Doran wait there, Landry seated at the head of the table and Vala pacing nervously by the observation-window.

The general stands and greens Aeryn warmly. "Commandant Sun. An honor and a pleasure."

"Likewise, I'm sure," says Aeryn.

Landry says, "Your sister tells me that Jacek is expected to arrive soon, so I'll leave you two alone to catch up, or plan your escape, or decide where to hide the valuables. However you want to play it."

"Are you implying that my father isn't trustworthy?" says Vala, with only a small hint of sarcasm.

"Well, in terms that Mrs. Crichton here would understand, the man  _could_  talk a Hynerian Dominar into going on a diet." He slips past Aeryn and moves over to his office, says, "Excuse me, ladies," and then closes the door.

An awkward silence descends upon the conference room. Neither Aeryn nor Vala moves to sit down, but Vala leans her back on the window. After a long moment, Vala says, "You don't like me. I get it—really, I do." She doesn't look Aeryn in the eye; she can't bring herself to. "You're a famous—hero, and warrior, and—and—whatever it is you do, and I'm just a thief who can fill out a corset—"

"You're a member of SG-1," says Aeryn. "And you're defending a planet that isn't even yours. That sounds pretty heroic to me." She finds herself taking the same tone that she uses when Deke is in one of his sulky moods.

Vala smiles and finally looks at Aeryn. "You're just saying that because—"

But the base klaxons interrupt her. Walter's voice comes over the P.A.: "Unscheduled offworld activation!"

Vala leads Aeryn down to the gate-room. On the way, she ducks her head into the control-room and tells Walter, "It's him; open the iris."

They pass through the heavy blast-doors and into the gate-room, just as the iris grinds open—and Jacek appears at the top of the ramp. He looks around, a bit confused—there are a couple of MPs stationed in here as well, and they train their rifles on Jacek for a few seconds, until it's obvious that he's a lone and unarmed, and Vala motions for them to lower their guns. "Hello?" he says. "Ah, Vala! You—" And then he sees Aeryn standing next to her, in a red-and-black Peacekeeper uniform, and freezes.

"Hello, Jacek," says Vala venomously. At the same instant, the wormhole behind him disengages.

"Um… hi, honey. Good to see you—how long's it been?—well, nice visit, but I should probably be moving on now. Can you have Walter—is that still Walter up there?—can you have him dial that one planet, P3X-866 I think you call it? The beaches are lovely there this time of year—"

"Are you Talyn?"

Jacek freezes again.

And so Aeryn steps closer and repeats herself: "Are you Talyn Lyczac?"

In an instant, every aspect of Jacek's bearing changes. The charming con-man disappears: his shoulders straighten, his gaze hardens, and a tired old soldier stands before them. "I would know Xhalax's daughter anywhere. Hello… Aeryn Sun."

Vala's eyes widen, and her jaw drops. She gasps, darts forward, and swats her father on the arm. "It's true? It's true! Oh, you—you—" she huffs, not knowing quite what to say, except, "—you're an  _alien_!"

Jacek shrugs. "It was a  _long_  time ago. I haven't gone by my Sebacean name in—damn, nearly forty years." He turns to Aeryn and opens his arms. "But—look at you! You're the spitting image of your mother! Say, how is ol' Xhalax these days? I mean, I know she tried to kill me and everything, but since I pulled the wool over her eyes, I'd say no hard feelings, water under the bridge—"

"Xhalax is dead," says Aeryn. "She died… a long time ago."

Jacek falls silent for a moment, fidgets with his hands, shuffles his feet. "I'm… very sorry to hear that," he says quietly. "I loved her, you know. I really did. For what it's worth."

"What happened?" asks Aeryn. For her, the dam is finally starting to break—her eyes have begun to well up with tears. And her words are thick with unvoiced meaning.

"I want to know too!" cuts in Vala. "I'm half-Sebacean! What does that mean?—do I have to stay out of the heat? Was  _my_  mother really my mother!?"

"Yes, your mother was really your mother," Jacek tells her. "Look, this is kind of a long story, so is there somewhere comfortable we can go?"

Vala and Aeryn stand before him with their arms crossed. Vala taps her foot, and Aeryn cocks a thumb over her shoulder at the conference room through the observation-window.

Jacek sighs. "Lead the way."

* * *

And so Jacek tells his story. He was a Peacekeeper officer, a lieutenant, probably could have made captain if he'd pushed for it—but he wasn't the ambitious type. Too smart to be ambitious. His weakness was that he'd fallen in love with a woman who was an even better pilot than he was: Xhalax Sun. Theirs was a whirlwind romance, and they kept it as secret as possible, but in Peacekeepers nothing is ever really your own.

Not even a child.

When Aeryn was conceived, they were both overjoyed. When Aeryn was born, Talyn had never been happier in his life. And later, when Aeryn was only four or five cycles old, and Xhalax couldn't stop herself from visiting her daughter—well, Talyn might have done the same thing, but he was too smart for that.

Smart enough, too, to anticipate what High Command would do to him and to Xhalax when she was inevitably found out. He kept his ear to the ground, called in markers, discovered the order: he was the older officer, less effective in battle, so Xhalax would be the one with a choice. Xhalax would be the one ordered to kill either him or Aeryn—and of course it would be him, how it could it go down any other way?

And so Talyn let it happen. In fact, he orchestrated it, without Xhalax ever having known. He fed her the idea of Prowler sabotage. Faked the crash, faked his own death, made sure that Xhalax would receive the credit. And High Command? Well, he couldn't fool them, but then, he didn't have to: they were impressed. Talyn Lyczec was an older officer, but he had wits and flair and creativity. And so the Peacekeeper top brass were able to get everything they wanted out of the whole sordid deal: Xhalax had killed once, she would kill again, and then again and again and again until she was the perfect assassin. And Talyn? Talyn would be reassigned to the Special Directorate. He was to disappear and become a Disruptor.

By rights, that should have been the end of the story. Talyn Lyczac dies in a Prowler crash and is never heard from again—and the man who  _used_  to be Talyn Lyczac becomes a Peacekeeper intelligence agent, a clever spy who lives out the rest of his life carrying out covert missions and being either a charming liar, always one short step ahead of danger, for cycles to come; or a cold, dead corpse on some nowhere planet on the edge of Scarran space, an ignominious end to a man of ignoble profession.

But, as luck would have it, one of Talyn's earliest assignments didn't involve spying on Scarrans, or Nebari, or Breakaway Colonists—he was sent to spy on Pathfinders. This was in the early days of the Peacekeepers' wormhole research program, long before Scorpius, before anyone had any real idea of anything. Wormholes were a mysterious phenomenon, Pathfinders were a mysterious people making use of that mysterious phenomenon, and Talyn Lyczac was sent to find out what was up with that.

Long story short, wormhole, funky ship, aliens with poison needles in their gills, no translator microbes, lots of shooting and screaming, some more wormhole, and suddenly Talyn finds himself on the wrong side of the galaxy, dropped unceremoniously off onto a primitive planet populated by Sebacean-look-alikes who don't even have pulse pistols, or dentics for that matter, but they do have this fancy stone ring that spins and smokes and makes more wormholes.

* * *

"So here I was, and here I stayed," he concludes. He sits in the conference room at the head of the table, Vala seated at his left, Aeryn at his right. He turns to Aeryn and says, "I couldn't go back, because I didn't know how! It took me cycles to get my bearings, learn the local languages, figure out how to travel the Stargate network and avoid the Goa'uld. And by the time I got through all that, I didn't  _want_ to go back! I wasn't a Peacekeeper anymore—and I figured that you and Xhalax had your own lives, and you would've forgotten all about me. And besides, there was Vala's mother—"

"Amongst others," says Vala snidely.

"—and Vala, and while I was a terrible father to her—of course I was, I was raised in Peacekeepers—I loved her. I wasn't going to leave her, just to try and find some past chapter in my life that was as good as closed."

"Until now," says Aeryn.

"Until now," echoes Jacek. "So… what happened, did the Peacekeepers finally find a Stargate?"

"It's a bit more complicated than that," says Aeryn.

"Well it doesn't matter," says Jacek. "Look at you—both my girls! And is that a Commandant's uniform—at your age? Aeryn, you're doing your old man proud!"

Vala rolls her eyes and scoffs, "Sounds like the older daughter is his favorite."

"I'm not playing favorites!" insists Jacek. "And anyway, I don't know which one of you is older: that first wormhole could've sent me back in time, right? So either one of you could've been born first!" He reaches up to pinch Vala's cheek—she swats his hand out of the way before it can come close—and adds, "And of course I'm proud of you too, honey. You survived being host to a Goa'uld, that's pretty special!"

"Oh, yes, of course," says Vala, "Aeryn makes you proud with military and diplomatic achievements, and  _I_  had a snake in my head."

"Come on, I'm only teasing," says Jacek. "Look, this is all—I didn't expect—the point of what I'm trying to say is, keep in touch, okay?"

Aeryn and Vala are both left nonplussed by that. "What?" says Vala.

"You know: don't be a stranger. Don't forget that I'm out there. I know they won't give me a second chance to live on Earth, but have me by for a visit sometime? Or come find me, if I'm not lying low and making it too difficult—"

Vala rolls her eyes again; Aeryn can tell that she's not buying into whatever sincerity Jacek is trying to project. But it gives her an idea, just the same. "Why won't they let you live on Earth?"

Vala answers for him: "Oh, just little naquadah heist gone wrong a few years back."

"Can't blame a guy for trying to set himself up with a little retirement nest-egg," says Jacek with a nervous laugh.

"Well if it's retirement you're interested in… how would you like to live in a royal palace?" Aeryn folds her arms and waits for Jacek to process her words. He can't quite piece it together and gives her an inquisitive look; and so she explains, "I am a close, personal friend to Rygel XVI, Dominar of the Hynerian Empire. When we're not traveling on our Leviathan, I live in his palace, with my Human husband and our three children."

Jacek's face scrunches up with confusion. "I thought Rygel was deposed a hundred cycles ago, when the Peacekeepers put his cousin—Dishpan?—on the throne." One microt… two microts… three microts…  _"_ _I'm a grandfather!?"_

* * *

Two very busy days later, John Crichton walks into a bar in Colorado Springs called O'Malley's. He wears a ball cap and sunglasses—hopefully, nobody will recognize him.

Mitchell is already seated at a small corner table. Two menus, two beers. He waves to his cousin. John crosses the distance and sits down.

"How'd it go?" asks Cameron.

"Went off without a hitch," says John. "Wormhole closed right up—didn't even have to fly in to pop the bubble."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, Carter just modified one of those glowy yellow squid thingies—"

"Ancient drones," says Mitchell. Then he looks around, and over his shoulders, and says, "Might want to keep that part quiet, though."

"Yeah, well, we sent it in, and it worked like a charm," says John. He pauses, takes a pull from his beer, and leans back in his chair a bit. "You guys… really know what you're doing. So, keep up the good work, I guess is what I'm trying to say."

Mitchell waves a hand nonchalantly. "It's mostly just Carter making the rest of us look good."

"Could be," agrees Crichton.

A waitress comes by at that point and takes their order. She gives Crichton a funny look—recognition, or the ghost of it, years out of date? Whatever it is, she doesn't make a scene or say anything to suggest what she might be thinking.

Mitchell idly starts tearing the label off his beer bottle. "Parnassus still doesn't have a working cloak. This is going to blow everything wide open, and soon."

"Kind of glad I won't be on the planet when it happens," says John.

"Amen to that," says Mitchell, who raises his beer bottle in a toast and clinks it to his cousin's. "The  _Odyssey_  launches tomorrow."

* * *

And so it did—the next day, Earth's flagship set out to carry Aeryn Sun and John Crichton home, to Hyneria Prime, to be reunited with their three children, D'Argo and Zhaan and Katralla II, and their dear friends Rygel XVI and Chiana and Noranti and Sikozu and other shipmates who had joined the crew of Moya and Pilot in the intervening cycles.

And family came with them on the journey, members new and old—Jack Crichton, Cameron Mitchell, Vala and Jacek. And Jack Crichton did finally manage to get one old favor repaid: he got security clearance for Olivia Crichton to find out about the  _Odyssey_  ahead of Disclosure Day, so that she could come with them on the trip to Hyneria. It was a special occasion.

And new friends too—Jackson, who wanted to divert their course just a little bit, to take some scans of Kobol and Cyrannus along the way, and Carter and Teal'c. It would be a journey worth remembering, of course the most adventurous members of SG-1 would want to be there.

But the kind of trouble that would meet them along the way—

* * *

**Epilogue**

* * *

On the edge of Scarran space, a transport docks with a mighty ship—Emperor Staleek's own  _Decimator_. The enormous warship is all sharp angles and sharp fins that narrow into pointy spikes. The tiny transport shuttle is a mere, unassuming orb.

Within the vessel, three Scarrans—one noble caste, two long-faced warriors—move through the corridors. The noble Scarran marches with purpose: he has an audience with his emperor. The two warriors carry a metallic chest between them.

At last, the throne room. Emperor Staleek sits on the round, sleek throne. He holds his hand out, palm upwards, claws pointing at the newcomers. "General Vausai. Speak."

The Scarran general steps forward, drops one knee to the floor, and bows his head. "Exalted Emperor, we have finally captured a soldier of the mysterious foe who has plagued our coreward border for a cycle and more!"

Staleek's eyes widen. "This news is unexpected—but welcome. Rise, General, and tell me—has this enemy soldier been taken alive or found dead?"

General Vausai stands, but he shuffles his feet nervously. "It is… impossible to say, Majesty."

Staleek frowns, then growls. "Do you dare toy with your emperor…?"

"No, Majesty!" exclaims the general. "It is simply—well, I will show you." He motions to the two Scarran warriors, who now place their silver box on the floor at the foot of the throne. General Vausai keels down, punches a key-code into a panel on the box, and unlocks it. The lid opens, and within are a collection of parts: silver-armored limbs, bulky arms and legs that ought to fit onto an anthropoid torso. But where the joints are severed from the body, exposed wires attest to the fact: this "enemy soldier" is a machine.

"An android!?" bellows Staleek. "Our dire foe, which has pushed us back across our own border, uses  _machines_  to fight its wars!?"

"No, Majesty," says the general, who now picks up the machine-soldier's head. The armor-plating is like silvered chrome, and the mouth is slotted, like… well, like a toaster. In place of eyes, there is a single black visor, and as the general handles it, a red light appears and begins to sweep back and forth, scanning the room. Even dismembered and dismantled, this thing is still somehow  _active_. "The machines—they call themselves Cylons—they  _are_  our foe."

And in the general's hands, in a monotonous, mechanical voice, the Cylon head just manages to groan out, "…By …your …command."

* * *

**Epilogue the Second**  
(Yes, Another One.)

* * *

Ever since he was a little boy, John Connor's favorite book has been  _The Wizard of Oz_. His mother Sarah used to read it to him; and now he uses names like "Baum" and "Gale" for his aliases.

John doesn't know what Sarah is up to these days—for all he knows, she might still be out in California, still investigating the Kaliba group, still working with Detective Ellison—but he's pretty sure that she doesn't know he's back from the future. They've had to keep all of that secret: no risking contacting her, no chance of leaks.

It was the only way they could infiltrate the Cheyenne Mountain facility.

John Henry was the one who pulled it off. As an advanced AI, his hacking skills made it possible to alter government records, forge identities, even get them into the most secretive program in the world—Stargate Command. And John Henry and Cameron were even able to pass medical exams, thanks their new mimetic polyalloy bodies and a bit of fancy programming. The T-1001 which had assumed Catherine Weaver's identity had sacrificed itself in the future to allow that to happen, and for that John Connor was grateful (imagine that, him, grateful to a machine)—especially since he had Cameron back, and she was basically invulnerable to damage now.

In 2027, they learned what they needed to know: SkyNet would be built in the Cheyenne Mountain facility, under NORAD, an advanced computer intended as a missile defense system. Its creators wouldn't know that it was destined become self-aware and nuke the world; they wouldn't know that trying to pull the plug would only make it panic and fear for its "life". They would  _never_  know what they were really doing.

But in 2027, even John Connor and the rest of the TechCom Resistance had always assumed that all of the advanced technology—the plasma rifles, the liquid metal, the time machine—had been invented by SkyNet itself. They had no idea, none of them did, until John Connor and John Henry and Cameron Philips had come back to the past and learned of the existence of Stargate Command, that all of it was alien. That T-1000s were based on Replicators and plasma rifles on ma'tok staff weapons.

That the Time Displacement Engine operated by localized wormhole.

It was all so crazy, and yet it all made so much more sense. And now that they knew—not just when it happened, not just where, but also  _why_ —they were going to stop it. John Henry, who thought of SkyNet as his evil "brother"; Cameron Philips, who protected John Connor because it was her mission (and maybe—possibly—because she loved him, and he loved her); and John Connor, because it was his destiny, were going to save the world.

* * *

**Epilogue the Last**  
(Yes, For Realsies This Time.)

* * *

"Okay, okay, that's it. I've heard enough." Martin Lloyd, television executive—and writer, director, erstwhile producer—puts the screenplay down in front of him and crosses his arms. A small, balding, bespectacled man, he cuts the least intimidating figure that his luncheon companion, Vala Mal Doran, has ever seen.

They sit at a table, at an outdoor café, somewhere in Vancouver, Canada. Vala picks up her script and leafs to the ending scene. "What's wrong with it?"

"It's not just that it's entirely sappy and totally melodramatic," snaps Martin. "Everything is too neat—too perfect! TV these days is dark and edgy and messy—you can't have a real ending anymore, now you just fade to black and don't ever explain what happened!"

"Well what if I don't want this to be a TV series?" returns Vala. "What if I think it should be a movie?"

"Pfft, dream on," says Martin. "Movies are out and TV is in! Haven't you heard of Netflix? Peak television? It's where all the true  _artistes_ are now—to say nothing of syndication money, if you can make it to a hundred episodes!"

"Well… I do have another script that I think might work for television," says Vala. "Did you read—?"

"You mean the one with the space-princess who flies around the galaxy on space-dragons, while space-knights from noble houses squabble and stab each other in the back in spectacularly gruesome fashion?" says Martin in a deadpan.

"Yes, that's the one!" says Vala excitedly. "Well!?"

"You can't just rip off  _Game of Thrones_!"

Vala pouts and once again picks up the screenplay that Martin had been reading through. "Everything in here happened  _exactly_  like I'm telling it. Honest."

"Yeah, right," snorts Martin. " _You're_  John Crichton's sister-in-law. Good one." He stands up from the table, throws a few dollar bills down, glances down at the money, re-counts it, and puts one bill back in his pocket. "Can you—uh, cover the rest of this?"

Vala nods and then waves Martin away disgustedly. "Whatever."

As he goes to leave, Martin tells her, "Look, I know television; I know what'll fly and what won't. It's how I got  _Wormhole X-Treme_ rebooted,  _and_  how I launched a successful spin-off!" Before he can get to the point, though, his cell phone rings, and he takes it out of his pocket and looks at the number. "Ugh, it's my producer, I have to take this. Anyway, remember: a hundred episodes—syndication money!" And then Martin Lloyd is gone.

Vala clutches her screenplay and sighs. It can't be that she's a bad writer—can it?

Nah.


End file.
